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"Beyond a thousand years from now humans are not quite recognizably human, and I have trouble finding characters."
- Larry Niven
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| Sleep Machine | ||
| A device guaranteeing a good night's sleep. |
An early description of this idea; I can't think of an earlier reference for the phrase "sleep machine".
| When Jim Eiler entered the bedroom, he saw that Marta was stretched full-length in the anti-gravity energies flowing upward over the mattress of her bed. She sprawled there in the careless abandon of a person who had dropped all of the world’s cares, at least for one night, the cords from the sleep machine looping down to her head from the elastic holder at the top of the bed. His first impulse was to turn off the sleep machine and awaken her, his second impulse was to let sleeping wives lie...
If sprawling in the anti-gravity energies was heaven, turning on the sleep machine was paradise. He always had the vague impression just at this point that blessed angel wings materialized under him, and that as they lifted him up, he slipped away into some paradise of wonderful delight. |
| Technovelgy from Short Trip to Nowhere,
by R.M. Williams. Published by IF in 1965 Additional resources -
|
Compare to sleep generator from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), by Arthur C. Clarke and the napcap from Saturn's Race (2000), by Larry Niven (w/S. Barnes).
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'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
