Nor can they drink alcohol.
Socrates has a valid point methinks
Which is why the novel explicitly said that alcohol is added to the “blood surrogate” that circulates through the system of the artificial womb where embryos are grown.
Exactly. They would have to determine which chemical in tobacco caused the problems.
Is it the nicotine? The tar? Something else? The mother having reduced oxygen because her lungs are damaged?
While reading a novel from The Culture series, Player of Games, which came out in 1988, I came across a passage that predicts key aspects of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The main character is a human (or post-human) from The Culture, a super advanced civilization with AI and genetic engineering and such.
He is visiting a much less advanced (though still far past us) alien empire where almost the entire culture is based around playing a super complicated board game, and participating in a tournament. It has become obvious that he is very skilled, even compared to many of the natives, and the press has turned against him for this reason:
Eta: and another great line:
That’s not Banks anticipating QAnon. That’s QAnon ripping off millennia of prior folklore and slanders.
Going back in the thread, for me the thing about ST Court Martial isn’t the faked recording. Once I knew how a TV worked, I immediately saw it would be theoretically possible to make a TV image show anything. After all, it’s ALL just dots on a screen.
No, it was that I couldn’t figure out how making a fake recording affected Spock’s chess game. Why should there be any connection at all? Then I realized - the encryption! For the recordings to be of any evidentiary value, they have to be protected. Finney creating the recording wasn’t the problem, Finney beating the system in place to prevent him from doing just that was the genius. And the encryption must run through the entire programming and data storage, otherwise it would be too easy. There were likely other data errors, just no one ever noticed.
An the writers were so far thinking they didn’t even know that’s what was happening in the show. 
I think a lot of the time in cases like this it’s not so much that Star Trek “predicted” flip phones and iPads. It’s more like people watched Star Trek during their formative years, grew up to become engineers, and went “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we built a device that looks like that thing they used in Star Trek”. In other words sci-fi often influences what future engineers decide to build.
Indeed, the whole “adrenochrome” thing is just Blood Libel with a fresh coat of paint on it.
Didn’t Pee Wee’s playhouse have a phone booth where he’d “video call” a friend… after choosing and pulling down a shade behind him, with a foreign scene on it?
It’s been too long, but I think the callee would often say "Oh, Pee Wee, are you in Paris?!?"
I spent a summer working at a camp with only one paperback book. It included The Machine Stops, so I read that probably fifty times back in the '60s.
I remember thinking that the most prescient part would be that WHEN people became addicted to computers, they’d also end up bored with real life.
“Life away from The Machine gives me no new ideas…”
I have to mention a short story by Anne McCaffery called Dull Drums, even though I think it’s almost the opposite of what the OP asked for.
It has the one worldwide computer common to SciFi before PCs took over. The main character and her classmates are purging old interactions by deceased people who had used the computer: “the woman who recorded her husband snoring so she could prove to him that he did. After he died, she’d have that played back every night so she could get to sleep.” and “the man who programmed a report of his luxury credit standing to wake him up every morning and put him to sleep at night. Then he won the Index Lottery and canceled the instructions.” There were also people putting their writing on the computer (blogs?)
These things have happened, just with PCs. However, I think she got two things wrong - that people didn’t use the Computer to communicate, and this
“The subtle change of fear and suspicion of his neighbors to fear and suspicion of the computer-based society: then a gradual acceptance of computer-assistance. We all started with records beginning in 1990 when the main Comp banks were switched on in this Metropolis, so you should all see what I mean. By mid-century I noticed a definite drop in the incidence of recorded paranoia, and the incidence and repetition of psycho-chem therapy. It’s noticeable because people begin inputting the most deeply intimate secrets. They’ve realized that no one can break a privacy seal"
Everything kinda blew up at about 3am in the ER today, I’m on the phone listening to a smarmy recorded message, a mindless, souless, treacly voice filled with satisfaction despite being of no actual help. I’m helpless with frustration and no better option than to let it run its course and I’m thinking ‘Sirius Cybernetics belongs in this thread.’
For decades now corporations have wanted anyone who happens to be a human being to talk on the phone like a robot anyway, regurgitating the carefully crafted-by-lawyers non-promises. The goal had already been to make blindly followed bureaucratic and corporate rules impersonate intelligent thought. The use of Large Language Models doesn’t detract anything at this point.
1946: Two-way wrist radio
With upgrades, its range increased from an initial 500 miles to 2500 miles, making it exactly the communication tool needed by a city cop!
1964: Two-way wrist TV
Camera with a 180-degree image field and Atomic Light!
1986: Two-way wrist computer
Long-range wireless link to law-enforcement databases, lie detector, stylus-type probe for chemical analysis – no more tasting that white powder to see if it’s “the real stuff”! Later upgraded to accept external micro data discs, including one with a “list of all the known racist kooks in the city.”
1997: Wrist Geenee
Added RADAR, SONAR, GPS, holographic projector, X-ray camera,software to determine passwords and lock combinations. Upgraded with a TASER – oh, boy!
2011: Wrist Wizard
All of the above, plus a satellite phone, plus holo-projected keyboard. It’s iPhone 88!
Jules Verne’s A Journey from the Earth to the Moon written in 1865 had the astronauts take off from Florida, to better match the moon’s orbit and take advantage of the rotation of the Earth.
(They were launched from a cannon rather than on a rocket, though.)
There are a lot of other interesting parallels, as Life magazine pointed out in an illustrated article. The vehicle used in Verne’s book was made of aluminum (light weight but strong) and almost the size of the Apollo command module and its attached service module. The progress was monitored by a huge telescope at about the same latitude as the launch.
Of course, the idea of using a giant gun to shoot people to the moon would work, in principle, but the people would be squashed to jelly by the huge acceleration. The idea didn’t seem to bother the Martians in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, who seem to have used a similar cannon to propel themselves to Earth. Evidently Martians, although they had squishy bodies, can take sudden acceleration without harm. (Also deceleration – their “cylinders” didn’t use parachutes or any other means of slowing down, but simply crashed into the earth when they got here.) That’s why we used rockets.
I’m sure Verne was aware of the lethality of his moon shot, but ignored it in the interest of telling a good story. That he was aware of the limitations of his technology is made pretty clear in the rarely-mentioned second sequel to From the Earth to the Moon, a novel variously translated as Topsy-Turvy and The Purchase of the North Pole. In it, the power of a much larger gun than the one used for the moon shot is see n as woefully inadequate to make a perceptible change in the tilt of the Earth’s axis.
Despite the similarity in appearance of the pointy-ended bullet-shaped craft in Verne’s novel, it was a ballistic shell rather than a rocket. It really was a bullet, shot from a giant gun. Before they decided to put passengers in it, the projectile was going to be a sphere, like a musket ball. Edward Everett Hale’s “Brick Moon” in his 19th century story was also sphere, but into orbit by a giant catapult. Most realistic 19th century (and early twentieth century) trips to outer space involved ballistics, and their craft were shaped like bullets or spheres. Otherwise they used anti-gravity devices (as in Robert Cromie’s A Plunge into Space, or Wells’ First Men in the Moon. Or even more fanciful methods, including balloons. The idea of a rocket to achieve interplanetary flight hadn’t yet made a mark in the public consciousness, or those of science fiction writers.
Had to share this anecdote from William Schechter’s seminal 1970 volume The History of Negro Humor in America.
During [Dick Gregory’s] opening before Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, he told them he expected “robots” and, pointing to, the huge pipe along one wall of the auditorium, said, “Ain’t that a computer? One of them mad machines you put the questions in, like ‘Is there a God?’ and it goes whirrr and whickitcha-whickitcha and finally comes up with a slip of paper with the answer: ‘There is, now!’”
Somebody’s been reading!
That should be “the huge pipe organ”. Sorry, Dick.