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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
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| Websight | ||
| A way of visualizing the Internet internally. |
In the novel, Caitlin is a typical teenager who loves the social aspects of the Internet. The fact that she is blind doesn't seem to slow her down.
Then, she tries an implant to help her see. Unexpectedly, the implant actually lets her internally "see" the Internet.
| "We need a name for what I've got, something to distinguish it from normal vision... "
"...I was thinking we should call it 'websight'" [said Kurooda.] "Website? Oh - websight." She clapped her hands together and laughed. He didn't get it, she realized. |
| Technovelgy from WWW: Wake,
by Robert J. Sawyer. Published by Ace in 2009 Additional resources -
|
Here's another quote that describes what is like from Caitlin's point of view:
This version builds upon previous uses of the idea. See cyberspace from William Gibson's 1982 short story Burning Chrome and portal from Vernor Vinge's 1981 story True Names.
Although each part of the Web she was was unique, it all followed the same general pattern: colored lines representing links, glowing circles of various sizes and brightness indicating websites...
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Science Fiction
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
