He perhaps had read the novelization of
2001, published a year earlier:
--begin quote--
There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. When he tired of
official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the
ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up
the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and
had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term
memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items
that interested him.
Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle
would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had
finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed
examination.
Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last
word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from
Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any
newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into
the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging
flow of information from the news satellites.
It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or
later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the
Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.
There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked.
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its
contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict,
gloomy editorials - these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being
sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers
of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.