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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Treeship | ||
| A single, enormous tree grown as a spacecraft. |
The Yggdrasill, one of only five treeships in existence, is used to take the pilgrims to Hyperion.
| The Consul remembered his first glimpse of the kilometer-long treeship as he closed for rendezvous, the treeship's details blurred by the redundant machine and erg-generated containment fields which surrounded it like a spherical mist, but its leafy bulk clearly ablaze with thousands of lights which shone softly through leaves and thin-walled environment pods, or along countless platforms, bridges command decks, stairways and bowers. Around the base of the treeship, engineering and cargo spheres clustered like oversized galls while blue and violet streamers trailed behind like ten kilometer-long roots...
The Consul paused, moved to the edge of the walkway, and took a quick step back. It was at least six hundred meters down - down being created by the one-sixth standard gravity being generated by the singularities imprisoned at the base of the tree ... A Templar treeship normally carried between two and five thousand passengers; it was easily the most desirable way to travel between the stars. |
| Technovelgy from Hyperion,
by Dan Simmons. Published by Doubleday in 1989 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the house trees from The Houses of Iszm (1954) by Jack Vance.
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and Technology from Hyperion
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and Technology by Dan Simmons
Tech news articles related to Hyperion
Tech news articles related to works by Dan Simmons
Treeship-related
news articles:
- Tooth Enamel Secret To Stronger Aircraft
- Computational Wood: Grow Circuits In Living Trees
- Japan's LignoSat Space Wood Satellite And Dan Simmons' Treeship
- Wood-Panelled LignoSat Launched
| Europa Clipper Plate Carries A Special Message |
| China Wants To Build Mega Space Ships |
| Dream Of Building Your Own Rocket? |
| Used Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Will Fly Again |
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'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.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
