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"I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff."
- William Gibson
 |
| Mechanical Tune-Maker | ||
| An electromechanical device that created unique music. |
| The place was cool and dark. A few men and women were at the bar; the rest sat around tables. Some youths were playing throw in the back. A mechanical tune-maker wheezed and composed in the corner, a shabby, half-ruined machine only partially functioning... The drink mixer had long since fallen apart. Only wine and beer were served. No living man knew how to mix the simplest drink. |
| Technovelgy from Last of the Masters,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Orbit Science Fiction in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the robot music described in The Robot God (1941) by Ray Cummings, the meloderge from Saboteur of Space (1944) by Robert Abernathy and the computer-created dub from Neuromancer by William Gibson.
See also the verse transcriber from Studio 5, The Stars, a 1971 short story by JG Ballard. Also, consider the Darkdawn city from Dying of the Light, a 1977 novel by George RR Martin.
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
