Speculative Technology Quotes

On the far side of the bay was the command station that controlled the door, which was currently semi-open. Rather than the normal closed maw of steel, there was a network of pulsing gold veins crisscrossing the gaping mouth of black - a nitrogen membrane keeping the molecular air contained and pressurized while allowing aircraft to pass through. ~ April Adams

The recorder consisted of a biochip smaller than the head of a pin implanted into the hippocampus and nanosensors embedded throughout the body. Normally, the system lay dormant. But as soon as it detected severe deviations from the norm in various brain activity parameters - indicative of the stress caused by imminent death or great danger - the black-box would automatically contact the police and record the short-term memory in the hippocampus via molecular scanning. In the event of death, about one to two minutes of memories preceding the cessation of brain activity could be decrypted from the black box. ~ Bao Shu

There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way. ~ Andy Weir

Together, we could open up government and invite citizens in, while connecting all of America to 21st century broadband. We could use technology to help achieve universal health care, to reach for a clean energy future, and to ensure that young Americans can compete - and win - in the global economy ... ~ Barack Obama

I'm a spreadsheet guy. But you get to that moment of truth, and it has nothing to do with a spreadsheet. You've got to factor in what your competitors are doing, what the technology is doing, what your shareholders want, what your employees want, what your customers want, and you've got to make it happen sometimes. ~ Brian Roberts

The '80s convergence of comics' new adult sensibility with the movies' advancing technology was bound to catch the attention of even slow-on-the-uptake Hollywood, and this particularly was true when 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns' became phenomena. ~ Steve Erickson

Samsung's future hinges on new businesses, new products and new technologies. We should make our corporate culture more open, flexible and innovative. ~ Lee Kun-hee

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The great paradox of the 21st century is that, in this age of powerful technology, the biggest problems we face internationally are problems of the human soul. ~ Ralph Peters

It is a tremendous responsibility for us to have all the eyes focused on what we do and give people exactly what they need when they ask for it. ~ Larry Page

When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" I was usually asked this by a Black person ...
What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking
whoever "everyone" happens to be this year.
And what good is all this to Black people? ~ Octavia E. Butler

We wish to break with all aspects of the liberal State: with its welfare and its warfare, its monopoly privileges and its egalitarianism, its repression of victimless crimes whether personal or economic. Only we offer technology without technocracy, growth without pollution, liberty without chaos, law without tyranny, the defense of property rights in one's person and in one's material possessions. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Movie-making is telling a story with the best technology at your disposal. ~ Tom Hanks

The surviving intelligent life form on Earth is not going to be carbon-based; it's going to be silicon-based. ~ Paul MacCready

[On technology:] A realm of intimate, personal power is developing
power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. ~ Stewart Brand

There is a danger, when thinking of the earliest civilized people, of putting too much emphasis on technology. One tends to assume that if you don't have, at least, a lavatory and perhaps something that will take you a lot faster than your own feet, or a certain number of gadgets in the house, then you must be in some way, a bit backward and defective ... the important thing to remember is that technology is not necessarily the same thing as civilization. ~ Jacquetta Hawkes

Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again.
Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.
But all the pressures go the other way, towards learning what is immediately useful, what is functional. More and more the demand is for people to be educated to function in an almost certainly temporary stage of technology. Educated for the short term. ~ Doris Lessing

I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science. ~ Erwin Schrodinger

Regardless of religion (or lack thereof), lovers of speculative fiction will swallow up these provocative stories. - Erin O'Riordan, ~ Tim Lieder

I don't think Edward Snowden deserves a death penalty or life in prison. I think that's inappropriate. I think that's why he fled, [because] that is what he faced. ~ Rand Paul

Speculative Encounters New Stories from the Slipstream by C.L. Nichols Speculative Encounters: New Stories from the Slipstream
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I hope you enjoy reading these Speculative Stories from the Slipstream as much as I enjoyed creating them.
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The slipstream combines science fiction, fantasy and horror then

plants the resulting blend into the potting soil of mainstream

fiction. The 17 speculative stories cross the boundaries of genre.

Is a lineman really transported to an alternate reality after a lightning strike or is he hallucinating?

When vampires steal a man's wife, he follows to seek revenge with the assistance of a female vampire who offers him eternity.

Driving on a lonely country road at night, a man in a pickup sees a woman's bloody arm reach out from the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop road.

In the aftermath of a comet's disintegration in Earth's atmosphere, survivors must adapt – and was that an actual comet that exploded?
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eam
SPECULATIVE ENCOUNTERS: New Stories from the Slipstream

Speculative fiction is comprised of three related genres: science fiction, fantasy and horror. The slipstream intermingles these genres then plants imagination's resulting seeds i ~ C.L. Nichols

To understand products, it is not enough to understand design or technology: it is critical to understand business. ~ Donald A. Norman

Science is knowledge certain and evident in itself, or by the principles from which it is deducted, or with which it is certainly connected. It is subjective, as existing in the mind; objective, as embodied in truths; speculative, as leading to do something, as in practical science. ~ William Fleming

The world was in a confused turmoil-wars, H-bombs, confrontations, fear, hate, hate. And Hollywood was feeding the confusion with a steady diet of sex, violence, and lewdness. What wisdom needed, to catch up with our runaway technology, was time. And time might be bought not with violence, but with compassion-that divine unguent that lubricates and soothes our abrasive human hates. Compassion might just possibly slow down the ticking till we could defuse the world with reason.
And we had an outside chance of buying a little precious extra time by filming the life of Schnozzola, the great compassionate clown. A chance that got lost among stars and their satellites. Pity Pity.
Now what would I do? Certainly the world didn't need more films about sex, violence, and lewdness. Judging by contemporary Hollywood films, the United States was made up of sexpots, homosexuals, lesbians, Marquis de Sades, junkies too! too! beautiful people, country-club liberals, draft-card burners, and theatrical and religious figures bleeding make-believe blood for cause and camera. "Shock films," they called them; "skin flicks" that dealt not with the humorous, honest, robust, Rabelaisian earthiness that nurtures life, but with the cologned, pretentious, effete, adulterated crud that pollutes life. ~ Frank Capra

Protogen is in a position to take sole possession of not only the first technology of genuinely extraterrestrial origin, but also a prefabricated mechanism for the manipulation of living systems and the first clues as to the nature of the larger - I will call it galactic - biosphere. ~ James S.A. Corey

Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences. ~ Aaron Levie

Progress means progress of all humans from all walks of life, not just the progress in science, progress in technology or progress in philosophy. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Man, he could sell. As he liked to say, he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. But there was a more personal side of Steve Jobs, of course, and I was fortunate enough to see a bit of it because I spent hours in conversation with him over the 14 years he ran Apple. ~ Walt Mossberg

But spending too much time in the human world does strange things to them. Perhaps it is the amount of iron and technology that is so fatal to their existence. They start to lose themselves, a little at a time, until they are only shadows of their former selves, empty husks covered in glamour to make them look real. Eventually, they simply cease to exist. ~ Julie Kagawa

Susan Wojcicki at Google makes a point to leave the office at 6 P.M. After 9 P.M. she gets back online to handle any pressing work issues that need her attention. She told us she hopes that sends a message to all parents that it's OK to spend time away from the office. All the women we spoke to on the show use technology in a similar way. They are very clear that they don't need to be chained to a desk. They can take time out of their work day to be with their families. ~ Willow Bay

I was missing lectures leading up to an essay test, so I went downstairs & got my textbook & pretended to study, with Animal Planet playing in the background. Everyone we learned about was either white or some sort of predecessor of the white, Christian world--as if the Stone Age, Bronze Age & Iron Age were just Greek & Roman stepping stones. As if everyone outside of Europe was still grunting & digging for grubs. As if China, centuries before Jesus started squalling in his crib, hadn't already kicked Europe's ass in technology & art. ~ L. Tam Holland

Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are. ~ Werner Herzog

This technology will obviously become more prevalent. Who knows what will result? One thing is certain, computer technology will revolutionize the way we tell stories as much as movie film has. ~ Chris Wedge

The true musician is to bring light into people's hearts. ~ Bobby McFerrin

In addition to achieving outside the industry, agriculture, national defense science and technology modernization, we are faced with the important task of system modernization. ~ Zheng Bijian