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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Pocket Edition Law Library | ||
| A complete reference section in the palm of your hand. |
A young woman studying the law has a complete reference section wherever she goes.
| She locked
the door behind her, opened the unpacked valise, took out a pocket edition law library and sat down at the
table with it.
She clicked on the library's viewscreen, tapped the clearing and index buttons. Behind the screen, one
of the multiple rows of pinhead
tapes shifted slightly as the index
was flicked into reading position.
Half a minute later, she was glancing
over the legal section on which Dr.
Droon had based his claim...
Telzey snapped the tiny library shut, fastened it to the belt of her sunsuit and went over to the open window. |
| Technovelgy from Novice,
by James Schmitz. Published by Analog in 1962 Additional resources -
|
In this excerpt, Telzey makes further use of the pocket library:
Her fingers quickly flicked in the
index tape, and the stir of feeling
about her subsided, their attention
captured
again
for
the moment.
Her
thoughts became to some degree detached, ready to dissect another problem in the familiar ways and present
the answers to it. Not a very involved problem essentially, but this
time it wasn't a school exercise. Her
company waited, withdrawn, silent,
aloof once more, while the index
blurred, checked, blurred and
checked. Within a minute and a half,
she had noted a
dozen reference
symbols. She tapped in another of
the pinhead tapes, glanced over a
few paragraphs...
Telzey snapped the library
shut with fingers that had begun to
tremble, and placed it on the ground.
She climbed the bank of the lake
to a point where she was screened
both by thick, green shrubbery and the top of a single immense tree
from the sky, sat down on some dry,
mossy growth, took the law library
from her belt, opened it and placed
it in her lap...
Compare to the powered print-book from Prelude to Foundation (1988) by Isaac Asimov and the runcible from The Diamond Age (1995) by Neal Stephenson.
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'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
'...then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
