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"I am first of all not a science fiction writer … I write, I suppose, what the Latin Americans call magic realism."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| Self-Lighting Cigarette | ||
| A cigarette with a matchhead built in. |
| When they reached her apartment she put tobacco and drink close to him, then went to her retiring room, threw off her street clothes and put on a soft loose robe that made her look even smaller and younger than she had looked before. When she rejoined Lazarus, he stood up, struck a cigarette for her, then paused as he handed it to her and gave a gallant and indelicate whistle. |
| Technovelgy from Methuselah's Children,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
This same item is also seen in Double Star, which Heinlein published in 1951:
It appears that elf-lighting cigarettes were marketed much earlier, around 1903, by a company in Warwickshire, called the Self-Lighting Cigarette Co.
Compare to the self-igniting cigarette from The Howling Bounders (1949) by Jack Vance and the coffee cube from The Marching Morons (1951) by C.M. Kornbluth.
I could have played him on boards, or read a speech in his place, within
twenty minutes. But this
part, as I understood it, would be more than such an interpretation; Dak
had hinted that I would have to
convince people who knew hlin well, perhaps in intimate circumstances. This
is surpassingly more
difficult. Does he take sugar in his coffee? If so, how much? Which hand
does he use to strike a cigarette
and with what gesture? I got the answer to that one and planted it deep in
my mind even as I phrased the
question; the simulacrum in front of me struck a cigarette in a fashion
that convinced me that he had
used matches and the oldfashioned sort of gasper for years before he had
gone along with the march of
so-called progress.
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
