5th december 2003
aware of his work

Jules Verne predicted the round-the-world submarine, the moon-rocket and the Goblin Teasmade. Ray Bradbury's Mars sadly may not exist, unless on Christmas Day Beagle 2 lands on a mosaic pavement (I'm hoping), but here are a couple of good ones from him:

And he went on quietly this way through the remainder of a cool,
air-conditioned, and long afternoon; telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio, intercom, telephone, wrist radio . . .
from The Murderer

She was everywhere at once!
Streaking along high monster towers in instants, sizzling between high poles where small glass knobs sat like crystal-green birds holding the wires in their non-conductive beaks, branching in four directions, eight secondary directions, finding towns, hamlets, cities, racing on to farms, ranches, haciendas, she descended gently like a widely filamented spider web upon a thousand square miles of desert . . .
. . . She spilled out swiftly into rooms where life was rising from a slap on a naked child's back, into rooms where life was leaving bodies like the light fading from an electric bulb . . . she was in every town, every room, making light-patterns over hundreds of miles of land; seeing, hearing, everything . . .
from Powerhouse

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