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"The trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind."
- William Gibson
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| Womb Room | ||
| The ultimate ship's bridge. |
What does the bridge, the room in a space ship where the captain, navigator and other officers command the ship, look like in the far future? You've seen many efforts to answer this question; everyone remembers the original Star Trek bridge. Larry Niven has his own answer; it looks like whatever you want.
| The control room was a hollow sphere with a remarkable chair in the exact center, surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped bank of controls, and approached via a catwalk of metal lace. The chair would assume a fantastic variety of positions, and it gave indecently good massages. The spherical wall could disappear to display the black sky as if Corbell and the control bank floated alone in space. It would display textbooks on astronomy or astrophysics or State history, or updated diagrams of the ship. Corbell called it the Womb Room. |
| Technovelgy from A World Out of Time,
by Larry Niven. Published by Random House in 1976 Additional resources -
|
Here's an earlier version of the same idea, from Creatures of the Comet (1931) by Edmond Hamilton.
The huge coma walled the firmament before them, glowing like a colossal rampart of blinding light. Both had slipped dark glasses over their eyes but the light even through them was dazzling. They forgot their aching eyes in a brief moment, however, as the rocket sped into the region that marked the coma’s limits, and rushed on into its blinding glare.
Kirk and Madden voiced exclamations despite themselves. It was as though all in the universe had melted into brilliant light and force. The coma’s glowing gas, charged with incredible force, roared and bellowed against the transparent insulite windows of the pilot-house. Kirk, his hands tense on the firing-levers, knew that any other rocket would already have perished in a blast of electrical fire. Only their insulite shell protected them from instant annihilation.
The only problem with scrolling astronomical texts across your view screen is that you might inadvertently obscure something important. Imagine your embarassment if you were trying to read up on "meteors" - only to run into one!
They clasped hands with Jackson, then climbed the little ladder that led up into the rocket’s upright cylindrical bulk. Jackson saw the circular door they entered spinning shut from inside, and a moment later glimpsed the two of them seating themselves in the control-chairs, up in the rocket’s transparent-walled pilot-house. He waved his hand to them...
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
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'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
