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"Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful."
- Philip K. Dick
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| Filmbook | ||
| A storage medium for information, both text and video. |
Filmbooks not only show you interesting facts, but they help you to remember them.
| FILMBOOK: any shigawire imprint used in training and carrying a mnemonic pulse. |
| Technovelgy from Dune,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Putnam in 1965 Additional resources -
|
The filmbook technology builds on several different Dune ideas. Shigawire is a multipurpose science fictional device; it is a recording medium, based on the idea of wire recording, which preceded recording tape (in the real world).
The mnemonic pulse is a based on the real-world idea of a mnemonic device, a trick to help people remember. For example, I can easily remember the Harvard Spectral Classification Scheme, which goes in order of decreasing temperature. The types are OBAFGKMRNS; you can remember it with the mnemonic device Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now Sweetie. (One guesses that astrophysicists of that era were mostly male...)
A wealthy collector's study looks like this:
Compare to filmag from Sunward Flight (1943) by Leo Zagat.
The globe sat on a freeform stand at one wall of a windowless room whose other walls presents a patchwork of multicolored scrolls, filmbooks, tapes and reels. Light glowed in the room from golden balls hanging in mobile suspensor fields.
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Science Fiction
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
