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Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Women & typewriters will rule in 1998

As I wandered through Half Price Books today, I ran across a typewriter reference in an unexpected context.



In the year 1998, women will rule the world, according to The Girls from Planet 5 by Richard Wilson (1955). But typewriters will still rule the newsroom! 


Here's an older cover for this book, which seems to be a silly, possibly misogynistic take on the "battle of the sexes." In 1998, the State of Texas is the lone holdout against the new gynarchy.



PS: Thanks to Robert Messenger for uncovering this 1987 obit that tells us a little more about the author (including his mother's remarkable name):




3 comments:

  1. Personally, I welcome our new snowflake-bra'd redhead overlords! :D

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  2. Even Heinlein had engineers flying around the solar system calculating orbits with their slide rules. But in only a couple of generations, much of our technology has proved Arthur Clarke's "law" that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (at least to the brains of 1950). And asking an SF writer to predict magic is asking too much.

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  3. big fan of that clarke quote, john, and use it regularly.

    i'm thinking of a novel where we're all really dead in hell and when people die that's when they're really born and free. now i realize there must be hot redhead alien babes behind it all carrying magic toasters with nipples so powerful there's always some kind of time-space distortion around them.

    thanks, richard!

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