Well, looks like EPCOT Computer Central WAS a "series of tubes".

Mod whatever you want to and in any way you want to. Have fun!

But Bruce Sterling and William Gibson left this
pigeon-Whole Genre/"Trend" behind MANY years ago.

And unfortunately for these two of our boldest Leading Lights, "The Difference Engine" was damn near unreadable in its final collaborated, deadwood-published form.

"Steampunk" is as dead and boring as "Mirrorshades-Cyberpunk" is now.
Let's move on, folks!

But design ideas can be borrowed and blenderized and stirred back together in cool novel ways from ANY time and place. This discussion has left me wanting an Old Stone Age laptop with a flint-point stylus and Universally-Human-Understandable, non-culture-bound Pictogram-Chinese-Int'l- Airport-Sign-Style graphical interface. With Old Norse Runic/proto-Celtic Ogham hotkeys along the edges.

I have had the same kinda recurring plane crash dreams since I was 10. In them, I see a BIG plane crash right in front of me but am powerless to stop it. Then I try to run up to the crash and help the survivors, in great fear and terror of the horrible things that I will see there, but impelled to go and help them anyway. These dreams are extremely stressful and usually wake me up, so I remember them.

But the dream always ends right there. This is exactly what interested me in Ballard and this boing catch-post in the first place...

Synchronicity? A variant of the common dreams of being naked in public or of flying oneself?? I don't know and can't even guess! Interesting to see that other people have had the same experiences and recurring dreams, though....

The Register has a great take on this one:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/11/us_war_robot_rebellion_iraq/

"Apparently, alert American troops managed to quell the traitorous would-be droid assassins before the inevitable orgy of mechanised slaughter began. Fahey didn't say just how, but conceivably the rogue robots may have been suppressed with help from more trustworthy airborne kill machines, or perhaps prototype electropulse zap bombs."

Check the comments...

GhostLord Beaverbrook, I think it was an editor at a British publisher who sent him that note. (Editor= reader? Perhaps the distinction is immaterial....)

Citation follows: "Prophet With Honour"
David B. Livingstone on why J.G. Ballard is one of the most vital writers of the 20th century

"This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!"

It was with these ironic words that an editor at J.G. Ballard’s publisher futilely urged the suppression of Crash over a quarter-century ago, a book which many have since come to see as a visionary masterpiece.
-----------------------------------------
I'm with Kyle here, and as for a PETA for humans? - I'm not sure there are any...
..........

Permit me to comment here with J.G. Ballard's Introduction to the 1995 edition of CRASH in its entirety:

Introduction to Crash
by J.G. Ballard (1995)

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia.

Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

In addition, I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction — conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.

Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th-century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?

I feel myself that the writer’s role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options of and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.

Crash is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills of hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason?

Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.

Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.

– J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Crash, Vintage, 1995.

Results of this trial are now IN. Summary: Prosecutor laughed out of Court, case DISMISSED!
see:
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/410165

This is news? Oh, that Ama.zone sells U Element #92, I guess.

These guys below have some of the last U-doped
glassware around - all individually tested &
certified as to known calibrated sources, all the
docs included. It fluoresces under UV light like
you wouldn't believe.

Alpha and beta emitters mostly. Safe to handle, just don't eat or smoke the free ore sample they send. It's from the same mine that supplied the Manhattan Project and is MUCH hotter than the glassware.

http://www.unitednuclear.com/marbles.htm
http://www.unitednuclear.com/supplies.htm

This article was also among the first to introduce
the "system of tubes" description - now memed as a
reference to idiots trying to explain the Internet.

I just bought some of the last remaining
uranium-doped glassware to be made, from

http://www.unitednuclear.com/supplies.htm

They really fluoresce under UV light,
and safe to handle. But I always wash my
hands after messing w/ them...