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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts

Perpetual Train  
  A vast machine that lays its own tracks as it moves forward.  

Ahead... was the perpetual train.

Judah had walked its length, skirting the crews. it was a rolling-stock town, an industrial citylet that crawled. At the end of a no-man's-land of empty rails, he saw the work. New Crobuzon reaching so far. The leviathan unfolding of metal, the greatest city in Bas-lag rolling out its new iron tongue, licking at the cities across the plains.

Technovelgy from Iron Council, by China Mieville.
Published by Del Rey in 2004
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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Iron Council
  More Ideas and Technology by China Mieville
  Tech news articles related to Iron Council
  Tech news articles related to works by China Mieville

Perpetual Train-related news articles:
  - Brick Road-Printing Machine

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