Classics

Who's in charge here, anyways?

Wolf Sets Standard for AI, Culture in Robots of the World, Arise!

Reading Time: 23 minutes By N.T. Narbutovskih The term “droid” has a special place in the heart of everyone who has a passing familiarity with science fiction. Mari Wolf coins the term in this quirky tale about robots, consciousness, and humanity. Wolf’s forecast of the rise of human-consciousness equivalent artificial intelligence has all the classic veneer of the Golden

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Phillip K. Dick’s Mr. Spaceship Turns AI On Its Head

Reading Time: 36 minutes Any sacrifice for the greater good is acceptable. War doesn’t wait on the needs of the individual. These themes are present in today’s tense international environment just as they were when Dick wrote this packed tale. From AI to warfare to original sin, this story hits all the big questions. Classic Phillip K. Dick tales

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A Drama in the Air

Reading Time: 23 minutes We were to start at noon. The impatient crowd which pressed around the enclosed space, filling the enclosed square, overflowing into the contiguous streets, and covering the houses from the ground-floor to the slated gables, presented a striking scene.

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Silence

Reading Time: 5 minutes “Listen to me,” said the Demon as he placed his hand upon my head. “The region of which I speak is a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire. And there is no quiet there, nor silence.”

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The Star

Reading Time: 15 minutes It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December.

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The Crystal Egg

Reading Time: 23 minutes There was, until a year ago, a little and very grimy-looking shop near Seven Dials, over which, in weather-worn yellow lettering, the name of “C. Cave, Naturalist and Dealer in Antiquities,” was inscribed. The contents of its window were curiously variegated.

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A Story of the Stone Age

Reading Time: 75 minutes This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea.

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A Story of the Days to Come

Reading Time: 107 minutes This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea.

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The Man Who Could Work Miracles

Reading Time: 22 minutes His name was George McWhirter Fotheringay—not the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles—and he was clerk at Gomshott’s. He was greatly addicted to assertive argument. It was while he was asserting the impossibility of miracles that he had his first intimation of his extraordinary powers.

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