"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. We will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits." (Leslie Stevens, The Outer Limits, [TV series, opening narration] 1963)
"Do you see, then, that the important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap-opera; not the income tax but the expense account; not the Bomb but the nuclear stalemate? Not the action, in short, but the reaction?" (Isaac Asimov, "Future? Tense!", 1965)
"Even the vagal flushes that seized at my chest seemed extensions of that real world of violence calmed and tamed within our television programmes and the pages of news magazines." (J. G Ballard, "Crash", 1973)
"Her grandparents, believers in progress, had always told her things were better now. Human minds had been darker when people couldn’t read late at night, their prejudices greater when they had lacked television’s images of other places, their work harder without the appliances many took for granted. Nina was not so sure; technical civilization had isolated people from the basics of life, and had fooled them into believing that they controlled the world." (Pamela Sargent, "The Old Darkness", 1983)
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." (William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984)
"A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about." (Douglas N Adams, "Mostly Harmless", 1992)
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