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"...a lot of people find adventure on the Internet. That's their idea of being interactive. My idea of being interactive is going on out and doing it on the street."
- Harlan Ellison
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| Cleaning Machine Warren | ||
| A room or space set aside for machinery when not in use. |
William Gibson, as a novelist, seems to have a special place in his heart for machines, using them to add a nineteenth century air to his work.
| All around her the planes of shadow in his study, the angular darkness. His hand coming forward, into the lamp's circle of light, unsteadily, to point at her, the robes cuffs sliding back to reveal a golden Rolex and more dragons, their manes swirling into waves, pricked out strong and dark around his wrist, pointing. Pointing at her. "Do you understand?" She hadn't answered, but had run instead, down to a secret place she knew, the warren of the smallest of the cleaning machines. They ticked around her all night, scanning her every few minutes with pink bursts of laser light, until her father came to find her, and, smelling of whiskey and Dunhill cigarettes, carried her to her room in the apartment's third floor. |
| Technovelgy from Mona Lisa Overdrive,
by William Gibson. Published by Bantam in 1988 Additional resources -
|
I think that the use of machines is meant to invoke an earlier time, the childhood of the character. It's a peculiar inversion, using machinery (and especially automata) to grant atmosphere or emotion to a book. I wonder if those of us who grew up in the period between the full flower of the great industrial machines (I'm thinking in particular of the Rouge steel plant in Michigan, a structure that really resonates with a nineteenth century vibe) and the Internet ascribe feelings of security to the idea of a machine warren.
And besides, if machines disappear somewhere and return shiny and recharged, ready for any task that comes, might you and I want to visit such a place?
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'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.'
