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Shortly before his intuition about an atomic bomb, Leo Szilard had been reading The World Set Free by H. G. Wells--a novel about a German invasion of France and the use of atomic bombs in a global war, a novel written in 1913 but set in the 21st century. Wells called his radioactive element Carolinum: "once its degenerative process had been induced, [Carolinum] continued a furious radiation of energy, and nothing could arrest it." In 1913, Wells was already writing about radioactive decay, half-lives, burning cities, even about deforestation, diminishing supplies of coal and oil, and the rush toward bankruptcy. And he inspired Szilard. Wells wrote--and Szilard read--of the final achievement of a world government and the abolition of atomic weapons--the "world set free." "The catastrophe of atomic bombs shook men...," Wells wrote, "out of their old-established habits of thought." And it was H.G. Wells who gave us the phrase, "a war to end all war."

Wells depicts the Martians firing spacecraft to Earth from a giant space gun, a common representation of space travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bearing similarity to the modern spacecraft propulsion concept of mass drivers.

Military theorists of that era had many speculations of building a "fighting-machine" or "land dreadnought" (as the Royal Navy called this hypothetical machine on which some experiments were made just before the First World War). Wells's concept of the Martian tripods, fast-moving and equipped with Heat-Rays and black smoke, represents an ultimate end to these speculations, although Wells also presents a less fantastical depiction of the armoured fighting vehicle in his short story "The Land Ironclads". [1] [2]

On a different field, the book explicitly suggests that the Martians' anatomy may reflect the far future development of mankind itself — i.e. that with the increasing development of machines, the body is largely discarded and what remains is essentially a brain that "wears" a different (mechanical) body for every need, just as humans wear the clothes appropriate to a particular weather or work.

Gibson explores artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, and multinational corporations overpowering the traditional nation-state long before these ideas entered popular culture. The concept of cyberspace makes its first appearance, with Gibson inventing the word to describe "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions."

fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the internet developed, (particularly the World Wide Web) after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about? (269).

He took a plane to Florence, Oregon, where the USDA was sponsoring a lengthy series of experiments in using poverty grasses to stabilize and slow down the damaging sand dunes, which could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways."[5] Herbert's article on the dunes, "They Stopped the Moving Sands," was never completed (and only published decades later in an incomplete form in The Road to Dune), but it sparked Herbert's interest in the general subject of ecology and related matters.

The CHOAM corporation is the major underpinning of the Imperial economy, with shares and directorships determining each House's income and financial leverage.

Melange is crucial as it enables space travel, which in turn is monopolized by the Spacing Guild; its Navigators use the spice to safely plot a course for the Guild's Heighliner ships via prescience using "foldspace" technology, which allows instantaneous travel to anywhere in the galaxy.

"The Veldt" — Two parents use an artificial "nursery" to keep their children happy. The children use the high-tech simulation nursery to create the predatorial environment of an African veldt. When the parents threaten to take it away, the children lock their parents inside where they are mauled and killed by the "harmless" machine-generated lions of the nursery.

"The Highway" — A community of simple-minded people living by a highway in rural Mexico go on living their normal, idyllic lives as the highway fills with people fleeing a nuclear war. The story ends with some travellers they help telling them about the nuclear war, and how the world is ending. After the travelers leave, the confused resident briefly wonders what "the world" is, and then continues with his life.

It is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society, written in the early years of the Cold War.

Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which ultimately leads to ignorance of total facts.[3]

Anyone caught reading books is, at the minimum, confined in a mental hospital, while the books are taken away and burned; at the maximum, the penalty is a sentence to immediate death. The main books that are not allowed are those, of great and famous works of literature, by many famous writers, such as Dickenson, Poe, Twain, and others.

"DRM doesn't anger consumers, content owners abusing DRM anger consumers."

At a conference convened by the overlords of DRM, Sony vice president Scott Smyers admits that he circumvents the copy protection on DVDs (CSS) in order to make backups for personal use.

The implementation requirements for AACS are even more stringent, even more exclusive. If you don't have a team of engineers available to make your new product work with AACS, then you're out of luck.

The constitutional rationale was that, if authors were guaranteed the fruits of their labor, they would be encouraged to write more. In today's world, it is publishers not authors that hold copyright. And the dominant view of lawmakers is that the "limited time" that copyright should be in effect is quite long.

Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised.

Verne, along with H. G. Wells, is often popularly referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction".[1]

Mercier and subsequent British translators also had trouble with the metric system that Verne used, sometimes dropping significant figures, at other times keeping the nominal value and only changing the unit to an Imperial measure. Thus Verne's calculations, which in general were remarkably exact, were converted into mathematical gibberish. Also, artistic passages and whole chapters were cut because of the need to fit the work in a constrained space for publication.