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"The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer. Day after month after year after story after book."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| Radio-Facsimile Receiver | ||
| A device that prints a newspaper in your home. |
Not really a prediction, Wilcox shows us a future that is now gone, thanks to highly readable displays that are so thin and light you can carry them throughout the house.
| Alone in his apartment, the feverish
young King of Speed paced, waited for
his radio-facsimile receiver to bring the
evening news. He was on a spot. By
this time the nation's press services
doubtless knew of his stinging defeat.
The radio buzzed. Layer by layer, the headlines printed off. |
| From Ben Gleed, King of Speed,
by Don Wilcox. Published by Amazing Stories in 1939 Additional resources -
|
By the year of this story, W9XZY of St. Louis delivers the First Daily Newspaper by Radio Facsimile. More than 1,000 U.S. households are experimentally equipped with fax receivers that electronically print morning newspapers overnight.
Compare this device to the personalized news from Hugo Gernsback's 1911 novel Ralph 124c 41 + and the homeopape from his 1969 novel Ubik (it is also called the homeostatic newspaper in his 1963 story If There Were No Benny Cemoli).
Don't forget the oldest reference I know about, the home news printer from The Senator's Daughter (1879) by Edward Page Mitchell.
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
