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"The bottom line in the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| D-9 Motherspinner | ||
| An enormous genetically engineered spider used to create large structures in space. |
What do you do when you need a lot more spider silk for your orbital structures? Tens of thousands of miles more? Easy - you build a bigger spider.
| "My father works a D-9," she said proudly, pointing at something on the bug's back. "My god!" I said. "That's a man. Is that your father?" "No, he works on the new Eight spoke, just getting started on that one..." It took me a moment to realize that she was talking about her father's D-9 Motherspinner. I was still taken aback by the man riding the eigh-legged behemoth. Until that moment I had not known they were piloted... The rider was in a pressurized box, like a howdah strapped to the back of an elephant. It was mounted behind the basketball-sized eyes and in front of the giant black sphere of her abdomen. He looked like the operator of a big crane or shovel, and that wasn't too far off the mark. He pulled levers and turned pulleys in a competent, bussinesslike way, and the spider turned or moved forward. "The D-9's don't weave," Poly said. "They sit in one spot and start extruding silk, and smaller spiders grab those and start running with them. She can put out thousands of miles of silk at one sitting. |
| Technovelgy from The Golden Globe,
by John Varley. Published by Ace Books in 1998 Additional resources -
|
Compare to these early ideas of purposive genetic engineering, the designed bacteria from Golden Age great Raymond Z. Gallun's short story Seeds of Dusk and the manufactured monsters from H.G. Wells' 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Thanks to Erik Glenn for suggesting this item.
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
