You need one of those coffee-makers with a timer. It ain’t science fiction, but it gets the job done…
We’re pretty close to Star Trek-style communicators, but I’d like the TNG type that you wear on your shoulder and just tap to activate.
It would be really useful if the Babel fish really existed.
Frederik Pohl, in The Years of the City, used neutral pronouns in the last story in the book. E, for he or she, um, for him or her, ums or umz for his or hers. Muddy was the word for parent (mummy and daddy combined) and an was the word for a human being. There are male and female ans, but usually only the word an was used unless the an’s sex was actually important. Female ans had a monthly flush, which was a hygienic routine for getting the menstrual period taken care of in a few hours in one day, rather than the method of taking 3-7 days of letting nature take its course. Of course, if a female an WANTED a pregnancy, e didn’t flush, but by having a flush, then any unintended pregnancy was effectively aborted before it was two weeks old.
I could really enjoy a replicator, too. And transporters and warp drives.
My parents’ lives were greatly improved when the coffee makers with timers came out. Neither of them function well without the morning jolt of caffeine.
I don’t think that I want to have my cell phone activate when I tap it. That would be too prone to accidental activation, I think. I’ve seen several people wear their cell phones hooked onto their collars, or neck openings, and I do this myself, so all we really need is for clothing manufacturers to realize that some people might buy shirts or dresses with a chest pocket specifically for cell phones.
Justice
They and their. Sorry if you insist that “they” can only be plural, but it’s been used as a singular for hundreds of years.
Reardon metal.
Roddy
Not quite true. They were exceedingly rare, but they did indeed happen. The most famous and well-documented ones were the showdown between Dave Tutt and Wild Bill Hickock and of course the OK Corral shootout.
Actually, there is evidence they were used by the Mongols and the Chinese.
I came in this thread to say “Uterine replicators!” from Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, which are basically external artificial wombs. Only behind-the-times types do something as barbaric as body birth! …Yeah. At 7 1/2 months, I wish.
Is there another fictional representation of artificial wombs besides Bujold’s? I’d love to read about it. Especially if it were written by a male – I was complaining to my husband that male-written SF has techno advances in things like weaponry and cool rockets, and it takes a female to come up with something that is actually useful to ME, like a uterine replicator. I’d love to be proven wrong on this.
X-ray goggles.
Same here. I didn’t know that.
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Also- a one-word title to replace Mr, Mrs, Miss, and Ms.
Someone once proposed “Person”, abbreviated to “Ps.” and pronounced “Pizz.”
Discuss.
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We already have “Hey, you!”
Holodecks or direct-neural-interface VR would be fun, but would probally lead to the extinction of humanity.
Did battle axes, battle hammers, and spiked metal balls swung the ends of chains, ever really exist outside of RPGs?
Also, did stereotypical New York cabbies (overweight Italian guys with strong New York accents who chomped on cigars and had repertoires of hundreds of off-color jokes and anecdotes, as opposed to turban-bearing men from countries with names that all end in “stan”) ever really exist?
Aldous Huxley has them in “Brave New World”.
Sonic Screwdrivers, they can fix anything, give Scotty/Geordi/Chief O’Brien/Kaylee/Chief Tyrol/etc a Sonic Screwdriver and they’d be unstoppable
Don’t know, come hang out on the Bujold list and we can discuss it =)
http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold