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"Retire? Yeah, I want to die with my head in the typewriter. That's my idea of retirement."
- Alfred Bester
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| Nanotech Buildings | ||
| Enormous buildings built with nanotech fibers. |
The scale of the buildings is left to the reader's imagination. However, if nanotechnology provides us with materials that combine exceptional strength with lightness, buildings can grow much taller.
| We were uncertain how you might feel about new buildings.
You mean the nano tech buildings? Layne had been struggling to keep his eyes open.
Yes some people find them disturbing. He knew their sheer brutality of scale from constructs, but virtually had failed to convey the peculiarity of their apparent texture, a streamlined organicism. They are like Giger's paintings of New York, Yamazaki had said but the reference had been lost on Laney. Now he sat on the edge of his bed staring blankly out at these miracles of the new technology, as banal and as sinister as such miracles usually were, and they were only annoying; the world's largest inhabited structures. |
| Technovelgy from Idoru,
by William Gibson. Published by Putnam in 1996 Additional resources -
|
If we ever get the one-dimensional diamond crystals that Arthur C. Clarke dreamed about for building a space elevator, we might get nanotech buildings.
For another look at life in very large structures, see the reference to arcology, from Oath of Fealty, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
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| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
| With Mycotecture, We'll Just Grow The Space Habitats We Need |
| Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast |
| LiquidView Ersatz Windows, ala Philip K. Dick |
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
