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"The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer. Day after month after year after story after book."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| Machine Apartment | ||
| Each person lives isolated in their own room, supported by a vast planetary machine. |
Fascinating picture presented of life in isolation.
| Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk--that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh--a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs... |
| Technovelgy from The Machine Stops,
by E.M. Forster. Published by Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909 Additional resources -
|
Everything you need - information, food, even medical care - is provided to you. No one needs to leave their room.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.
See the reference for the telemedicine apparatus from the same story. See also micro-bachelor apartment from Idoru by William Gibson, automated apartment maintenance from Ubik by Philip K. Dick and Quadraturin from Quadraturin, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanowsky.
Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Machine Stops
More Ideas
and Technology by E.M. Forster
Tech news articles related to The Machine Stops
Tech news articles related to works by E.M. Forster
Machine Apartment-related
news articles:
- Hotel Room Of The Future Is German, Retrotastic
| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
| With Mycotecture, We'll Just Grow The Space Habitats We Need |
| Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast |
| LiquidView Ersatz Windows, ala Philip K. Dick |
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
