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"it slowly dawned on me that the landscape of science is maybe what interests people a great deal in science fiction."
- Gregory Benford
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| Datasphere | ||
| The entirety of computers and their information linked together, typically on a planet, in concept. |
Clever term encourages the reader to visualize a vast linkage of computers on the surface of a planet, perhaps using connections in orbit, forming a sphere.
| "The colony worlds have limited dataspheres," said Johnny. "While there is some contact with the TechnoCore via fatline transmissions, it is an exchange of data only... rather like the First Information Age computer interfaces... rather than a flow of consciousness. Hyperion's datasphere is primitive to the point of nonexistence..." |
| Technovelgy from Hyperion,
by Dan Simmons. Published by Doubleday in 1989 Additional resources -
|
The term is also used in the novel to describe the totality of linked computer systems on a large ship:
Charles Stross picks up this term and runs with it in Curator (2003):
"How long until we land?" asked Brawne Lamia. She had been using her comlog to access the treeship's datasphere and obviously was frustrated with what she had found. Or had not found.
Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium — based on the or- bital momentum of a small Jovian iimer moon — is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians.
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'...the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded.'
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'
'...the combined Wind-Suncatcher, like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'I went to the control room where the three other men were manipulating their mechanical men.'
'The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course.'
'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
