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"The writing is clicking away in my head and piling up, and unless I get it on paper somehow it's going to create uncomfortable pressure in my skull."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Wrist Search Display | ||
| A wearable device that uses its own search beam to view scenes close by. |
| She lifted her left wrist and showed him, strapped thereto, what looked like an enameled wrist watch with a large bezel; only the dial of this was blank, and radiating from the sides were five gnarled stems. "Do you have these on Earth?" she asked. He admitted they did not. "Look," she said, turning her body at an angle and adjusting the stems. AS ALLISON looked, close by her side, the dial took on an opalescent glow, and dimly there appeared on it threads and shadows which under her adjustments cleared into a picture, animated—the heads and figures of half a dozen women. "Television," he said. "You’re receiving this from a broadcasting studio." "No," she corrected; "a search-beam, portable. I can focus it at a distance on whatever I choose. It passes through almost anything." ... The ethnologist sat on the edge of the cot and held up his wrist. What a marvel of ingenuity the little device was! Tentatively he turned the stem she had first touched. The dial glowed, then meaningless shadows appeared on it. The slightest movement of his body changed these shadows for new ones. He turned other stems and got what seemed to be a wall. Delicately he manipulated in the attempt to probe beyond. |
| Technovelgy from A Matter of Size,
by Harry Bates. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1934 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the Wireless Wrist Intercom from The Shape of Things To Come (1936) by H.G. Wells, Reserve Bracelet from Plague (1944) by Murray Leinster, Tattletale from The Game Players of Titan (1963) by Philip K. Dick, Wristband Viewer from Changeling (1980) by Roger Zelazny, Implant-Watch from Cloak of Anarchy (1972) by Larry Niven, Predator Wrist Display from Predator (1987) by John McTierna, Wrist Command from Tides of Light (1989) by Gregory Benford, Tracking Bracelet from Shadowspeer (1990) by Patricia Jo Clayton, Inertial Bracelet from Psychohistorical Crisis (2001) by Donald Kingsbury, Command Bracelet from Sagramanda (2006) by Alan Dean Foster and the Wristpad from New York 2140 (2017) by Kim Stanley Robinson.
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
