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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
 |
| Toll Door | ||
| An apartment door that operates on a cash-only basis. |
This idea flows throughout the novel; particular items require an immediate, cash payment.
Joe Chip is sitting in his apartment; he walks to his front door to open it.
| The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt." ...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. "You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug. |
| Technovelgy from Ubik,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1969 Additional resources -
|
In the past, I've seen bathroom stall doors that only opened for a fee; often when you pull to the curb with your car, you walk over to a device that accepts coins.
Here's another quote:
Compare this device with the cheerfully serviceful self-satisfied door from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
"Five cents, please," his front door said when he tried to open it. One thing, anyhow, hadn't changed. The toll door had an innate stubbornness to it; probably it would hold out after everything else.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Ubik
More Ideas
and Technology by Philip K. Dick
Tech news articles related to Ubik
Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick
Toll Door-related
news articles:
- PoBot Has Your Back - For 25 Cents
- Mobile Devices At Core Of Future Appliances
| 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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'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
