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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Fido | ||
| Combination television, news camera and surveillance device. |
In the novella, "fido" refers both to a display medium (like a large screen display) and to two-way communications, to portable surveillance devices and to news cameras.
| Chib is half-awake. He peeps down into the narrowing dark as the dream roars off into the subway tunnel. He peeps through barely opened lids at the other reality: consciousness. "Let my peeper go!" he groans with Moses and so, thinking of long beards and horns (courtesy of Michelangelo), he thinks of his great-great-grandfather. The will, a crowbar, forces his eyelids open. He sees the fido which spans the wall opposite him and curves up over half the ceiling. Dawn, the paladin of the sun, is flinging its gray gauntlet down. Channel 69B, YOUR FAVORITE CHANNEL, LA's own, brings you dawn. (Deception in depth. Nature's false dawn shadowed forth with electrons shaped by devices shaped by man.) |
| From Riders of the Purple Wage,
by Philip Jose Farmer. Published by Doubleday in 1967 Additional resources -
|
Also:
Rousseau Red Hawk winks at Chib and says, "Do you really think it's possible to paralyze all of LA with a single bomb?"
"Three bombs!" Chib says loudly so that Legrand's fido will pick up the words.
"One for the control console of the desalinization plant, a second for the backup console, the third for the nexus of the big pipe that carries the water to the reservoir on the 20th level."
Pinkerton Legrand turns pale. He downs all the whiskey in his glass and orders another, although he has already had too many. He presses the plate on his fido to transmit a triple top-priority. Lights blink redly in HQ; a gong clangs repeatedly; the chief wakes up so suddenly he falls off his chair.
Compare to True-vu lenses from Earth (1990) by David Brin and Newstaper Gear from Flash Crowd (1972) by Larry Niven.
The Young Radishes return to their table, a legless disc held up in the air by a graviton field. Benedictine glares at them and goes into a huddle with the other teemagers. At a table nearby sits Pinkerton Legrand, a gummint agent, facing them so that the fido under his one-way window of a jacket beams in on them. They know he's doing this. He knows they know and has reported so to his superior. He frowns when he sees Falco Accipiter enter. Legrand does not like an agent from another department messing around on his case. Accipiter does not even look at Legrand. He orders a pot of tea and then pretends to drop into the teapot a pill that combines with tannic acid to become P.
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'The world ... is drenched in unfamiliar information all the way to the horizon.'
'He saw one hiss by him as he rounded the corner, trailing a short whip antenna...'
'It may be organic damage. It may be permanent. Time'll tell, and only after you are off Substance D for a long while.'
It's the polite thing to do, and has been the polite thing to do for about four generations.
