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"We are all repositories for genetically-encoded information that we're all spreading back and forth amongst each other, all the time. We're just lousy with information."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Telechart | ||
| An interactive metal plate upon which were displayed celestial objects for interstellar navigation. |
| "The dark star is coming toward us at a tremendous velocity, remember. You will notice on the telechart-"
Together we stepped over to the big telechart, a great rectangular plate of smoothly burnished silvery metal which hung at the bridgeroom's end-wall, the one indispensable aid to interstellar navigation. Upon it were accurately reproduced, by means of projected and reflected rays, the positions and progress of all heavenly bodies near the ship. Intently we contemplated it now. At the rectangle's lower edge there gleamed on the smooth metal a score or more of little circles of glowing light, of varying sizes, representing the suns of the edge of the galaxy behind us. Outermost of these glowed the light-disk that was our own sun, and around this Hurus Hol had drawn a shining line or circle lying more than four billion miles from our own sun, on the chart. He had computed that if the approaching dark star came closer than that to our sun its mightly gravitational attracction would inevitably draw the latter out with it into space; so the shining line represented, for us, the danger line. |
| Technovelgy from Crashing Suns,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. in 1928 Additional resources -
|
One of the features that I like best is that it is interactive; it is not merely a display. The user can draw lines on it.
In other stories (like "Outside the Universe"), Hammond referred to it as a "space-chart".
Compare to the more advanced tank display from E.E. 'Doc' Smith's 1934 novel Triplanetary.
See also automatic navigator in A Matter of Size (1934) by Harry Bates, the
chart cabinet in One Against the Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson, the
pilot-robot in Collision Orbit (1941) also by Williamson and the article on astrogation in Methuselah's Children (1941) by Robert Heinlein.
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
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'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
