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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Photomnemonic Tablet | ||
| A device that both records and displays images with the same element. |
| I broke the seal on the dust jacket... The tablet was a featureless disk, like the blank used for grinding a telescope mirror, but darker - as if cast in obsidian. When I activated its remembrance function, its bottom-most layer turned the same color as the sun, for that was the origin of all the light now striking the tablet's surface. Because the tablet was out in the open with no lenses or mirrors to organize the light coming into it, it could not form an image of anything it saw... |
| From Anathem,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Morrow in 2008 Additional resources -
|
The photomnemonic tablet also had controls that would let the user page through the images in a variety of ways.
This device reminds me in some ways of a slow glass scenedow from Bob Shaw's 1968 story.
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'A worker replaced by a nubot... had to be compensated.'
'... forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers.'
'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
