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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
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| Picphone | ||
| A small telephone that has a screen to show pictures. |
Who thought about playing games on a phone in the 1970's? Only Philip K. Dick.
| The left wall of the cab opened and a picphone slid out, cord twisted in a baroque loop....
Seating himself, Buckman began an idle colortone game with the picphone; he flashed the flags of various extinct nations. |
| Technovelgy from Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1974 Additional resources -
|
Although the "picphone" is not a portable cell phone, it is still an interesting presentation of an idea that didn't come true for another forty years. No one thought about playing some sort of a game with their phone until after the turn of the 20th century. I grew up in the 1960's and a telephone was a single purpose device for making phone calls.
See also the pocketphone from Heinlein's 1953 novel Assignment in Eternity. As far as I know, the first reference to a pocket-sized telephone is in Heinlein's 1948 novel Space Cadet - the portable telephone.
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'If you're one of those rarities who haven't attended a rocket-polo "carnage", let me tell you it's a colorful affair.'
'They filed clumsily into the battleroom, like children in a swimming pool for the first time, clinging to the handholds along the side.'
'a walking balloon proceeded with long strides of its aluminum legs...'
'There was nowhere on the planet where science and technology could not provide one with a comfortable home...'
'Most men updated their PIP on New Year's Day...'
'...a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man.'
