(Sorry about previous send; I need to figure out how to disable the
touchpad mouse to prevent it from recording some keystrokes as ctrl+key
when I accidentally lean on it while typing - something easy to do on
most laptops, dammit...)

SF was never completely void of worldbuilding, even during eras when the
general image of SF was "Sci-Fi", ray guns and rockets and space-girls
(yes, "girls", not "women") in transparent bubble spacesuits with
bikinis underneath for minimum decency.

But sometimes, the extrapolations even in the _good_ worldbuilding
turned out to be wrong.

As an example, Crawford Kilian, in his three I-Screen novels (_The Fall
of the Republic_, _Rogue Emperor_, _The Empire of Time_) postulates
"flickreaders" and "fichemongers". The flickreader was a device that sat
on the bridge of your nose and your ears, like a pair of glasses, and
projected page images from cartridges sold by the fichemonger
(combination bookseller/newsstand), implied to be like
microfilm/microfiche. The "flickertube", used in 'Training' (and the
capital T was important!) used the same principle but was even higher
speed than the flickreader (which was only used by Trained people
anyway).

Other examples might include E.E.'Doc' Smith's _Lensman_ series (more or
less including "Masters of the Vortex" and the three David A. Kyle
_Second Stage Lensmen_ books), where "computers" were people sitting in
front of electro-mechanical calculators (not quite Babbage Engines), and
other similar anachronistic-to-a-1990s-reader technology could be found.

Specific examples are not the point of this post, however. Most of the
active players (including referees) on the list probably think in pure
present-future terms; that is, futuristic technology is largely based on
extrapolations of present or visible-on-the-horizon future technology.
The idea I'd like to put into your heads: What sort of anachrofuture
("AF", henceforth) technology can you think of to incorporate into
Traveller? I'm not suggesting that if you choose to incorporate such AF
tech that you go hog-wild and shove it into every corner, but I'd like
to see what sort of ideas you can come up with, and why.

--
Jeff Zeitlin, Editor
Freelance Traveller
    The Electronic Fan-Supported
    Traveller® Fanzine and Resource

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