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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl
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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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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
