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"There's a tendency to think that maybe if we can just throw enough hardware at the AI problem, then evolution can take care of the rest. Certainly that's how God went about making us."
- Rudy Rucker
 |
| Displacement Booth | ||
| A teleportation portal. |
The displacement booths were the sole and ubiquitous form of travel in the future society of the novel.
| A displacement booth was a glass cylinder with a rounded top. The machinery that made the magic work was invisible, buried beneath the booth. Coin slots and a telephone dial were set into the glass at sternum level.
Jerryberry inserted his CBA credit card below the coin slots. He dialled by punching numbered buttons. Withdrawing the credit card closed a circuit. An eyeblink later he was in an office in the Central Broadcasting Association building in Downtown Los Angeles. |
| Technovelgy from Flash Crowd,
by Larry Niven. Published by Fantasy And Science Fiction in 1972 Additional resources -
|
Displacement booths are similar to the more technologically advanced stepping discs created by the alien Puppeteers of Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld.
In Flash Crowd, Niven explores the idea more thoroughly than in Ringworld. He adds additional material about how stepping discs are used by Puppeteers in his new book Fleet of Worlds, written with Edward M. Lerner.
Compare to the telepomp from The Man Without a Body (1877) by Edward Page Mitchell, the
stepping discs from Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven and the
trip box from Eye of Cat (1982) by Roger Zelazny.
Also, see the libra-transmitter from Into the Meteorite Orbit by Frank R. Kelly, the cosmic express from The Cosmic Express by Jack Williamson, Jaunte from The Stars My Destination, the Transo from Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford Simak and the geofractor (1939) from One Against the Legion by Jack Williamson.
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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.'
