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This is one of my earliest stories - I wrote it in June, 1955, when I was just finishing my junior year at college but had already started my career as a professional writer. I sold it to a magazine of that remote era called FANTASTIC UNIVERSE, where it was published in the August, 1956 issue.
I think it stands up pretty well, even though I wrote it when I was only twenty - an intelligent consideration of some of the problems that the still virtually unborn computer age was likely to bring. When you read it, please bear in mind that computers, in 1955, were still considered experimental technology - "thinking machines" or "electronic brains" was what they generally were called - and musical synthesizers existed only in the pages of science fiction.
Of course I have survived to see the enormous, room-filling "electronic brains" of 1955 evolve into the pocket-sized computers of today, and to see the publishing industry begin to migrate from the print media to the various electronic formats. In 1997, one of the pioneering electronic publishing companies bought the right to distribute some of my stories on the Internet, and I included "The Macauley Circuit" in the package, though I wondered about how today's computer-savvy readers - who had not been born, most of them, when I wrote the story - would react to its quaintly archaic view of how computers and synthesizers would work. Evidently the story wasn't as quaint as I thought, because in the year that followed it was one of the three best-selling stories on that web site.
Genre: Science Fiction
I think it stands up pretty well, even though I wrote it when I was only twenty - an intelligent consideration of some of the problems that the still virtually unborn computer age was likely to bring. When you read it, please bear in mind that computers, in 1955, were still considered experimental technology - "thinking machines" or "electronic brains" was what they generally were called - and musical synthesizers existed only in the pages of science fiction.
Of course I have survived to see the enormous, room-filling "electronic brains" of 1955 evolve into the pocket-sized computers of today, and to see the publishing industry begin to migrate from the print media to the various electronic formats. In 1997, one of the pioneering electronic publishing companies bought the right to distribute some of my stories on the Internet, and I included "The Macauley Circuit" in the package, though I wondered about how today's computer-savvy readers - who had not been born, most of them, when I wrote the story - would react to its quaintly archaic view of how computers and synthesizers would work. Evidently the story wasn't as quaint as I thought, because in the year that followed it was one of the three best-selling stories on that web site.
Genre: Science Fiction
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Used availability for Robert Silverberg's The Macauley Circuit