If a title can be applied to anyone, then it contains no information and might as well be left off.
Sounds incredibly useless.
Improbability Drives.
Orgasmatrons.
Awesome short video on the topic, showing many artificial eye shapes. For the squeamish - part way through there’s a shot of one of these eyes being removed, with a small glimpse of an empty socket (just a deep pink/red, nothing dramatic or closeup). You can see that it’s about to come out, so just close your eyes if you’re nervous about it.
My Politically Correct Dictionary suggests an abbreviation of “he or she or it”. It happily comes out to “h’or’sh’it”
For myself, I want a phaser. That’s all. People can’t drive in two dimensions let alone three, so you can keep your flying cars.
There are Herbert’s axlotl tanks too. I think the Bene Tleilax used them exclusively.
spiked metal balls swung the ends of chains
Yes, though the last of them being fairly rare.
The change probably occurred with the shift in immigration in the '90s. There was also a shift around the same time in the cab company business model. Before, a company operated a fleet of cabs and collected the fares earned. Drivers earned a salary plus tips. Today it’s more common for drivers to lease a cab from a medallion-holding company at a high flat rate, and keep whatever fares they earn. I’d imagine the new model is that much more grueling of a job, and appeals more to recent immigrants with fewer alternative prospects.
Flying backpacks that last long enough to be useful. Comic book style rocket boots. Power armor.
They exist in David Weber’s Honorverse series. Honor Harrington has her baby transferred to one since pregnant women aren’t allowed ship duty due to radiation hazards and such. Notably her mother Alison carried Honor to term the old fashioned way and considers it more emotionally fulfilling; I’ve wondered how much of that is due to the author being male.
As far as fictional things that should exist, in the sense that they just seem so intuitively obvious that its surprising and disappointing that they don’t really exist, the top would have to be gravity control; a device that runs on electricity that either duplicates or negates gravity. Second place would be human-level AI.
As far as fictional things that should exist, in the sense that they just look so cool that its surprising and disappointing that they’re either impossible or impractical in real life, I nominate the winch gun: a device that shoots a grapple or spike (which always attaches securely), with a powered retraction capable of pulling at least a couple of hundred pounds several hundred feet straight up.
Board stretchers
Dragons like Puff and Pete’s dragon
Pookas like Harvey
Cite, m’friend? I’ve read TFW cover to cover many times and this is ringing no bells.
DAMMIT! Elendil’s Heir! I’m a something-or-other, not a something-or-other!
Chunky grey security camera images that can be enhanced to perfect clarity.
A search engine or program to which you can say, in plain simple language, search commands like “Give me a list of everyone who appeared in both [television show] and [movie]” or “Construct my family tree” without you having to put in any information yourself.
I know that IMDB as all the answers to the first, and quite a lot of the second can be found using online Mormon and government records, but I don’t want to have to do the work myself. The computers from Star Trek: The Next Generation onward could definitely do the job for me.
Replicants
Death Star
Cool X-Man style mutations.
I wonder whether we will ever see hoverboards from Back to the Future II in real life. Something tells me it might take a while…
Total immersion games like “Better than Life” in Red Dwarf. Of course I’d die playing in my fantasy world, but there are days when real life doesn’t feel worth the effort of living anyway.
Towards the end,
after the protagonist’s unpleasant, “you can’t go home again” visit to a crime-infested U.S. but before the cloned Man has become the dominant form of humanity, IIRC. Perhaps I’m thinking of another Haldeman book…?
The one we need most is some form of effective FTL. Being able to leave the solar system would be an enormous boon to the species.
But, c’mon, people.
All these posts and no one says lightsabers?
You people have no souls.