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"You have to budget the number of fuzzy rules you use to control a system. It turns out, you can state the optimality principle in three words: 'patch the bumps.'"
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Multispecies Hotel | ||
| A hotel set up to serve beings from different planets. |
This is an early use of this idea.
| Its name, flashing in
brilliant lights at night, was Hotel Cosmos. Within its walls lay a haven for every kind of intelligent extra-terrestrial creature who dared to cross the interplanetary and interstellar distances to the alien Earth. Few of those beings could have survived raw Earthly conditions for much more than a minute.
When you banded together in one building beings of hundreds of diverse forms and backgrounds, and of as many widely separated conceptions of what is just and what is not, automatically you formed a brew that had most of the ticklish danger of a charge of hyper-dynamium explosive... The aspect of all the corridors of the building was much the same. Their floors were heavily carpeted; the walls, of tooled metal, were dully shining in the subdued green glow of the lights. Their uniformity was broken at regular intervals by airtight circular doors, which resembled in a somewhat less massive form the portals of bank vaults. Each door displayed a number, wrought in black onyx inlay, and mounted on each were several small valve-wheels for regulating and adjusting the temperature, pressure, and gaseous composition of the atmosphere of the room within. |
| Technovelgy from Hotel Cosmos,
by Raymond Z. Gallun. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 Additional resources -
|
Everyone is familiar with the cantina bar scene in Star Wars (1977), showing a familiar location with unfamiliar guests.
Compare to the interplanetary restaurant from Asteroid Pirates (1938) by Royal W. Heckman, the science fiction restaurant from Expedition to Earth (1953) by Robert Zacks and the Draco Tavern appearing in that story series by Larry Niven.
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'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
