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"Writing about the future, I have a vested interest in there being a future for me to write about."
- John Brunner
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| Architectural Coral | ||
| A structure grown to a specific shape using small coral-like organisms. |
| It was a great sprawling bungalow, laid out in a rough cross, with the bulging walls typical of architectural coral. No attempt had been made to disguise its origin. Matt had never before seen a house which was not painted, but he had to admire the effect. The remnants of the shaping balloon, which gave all architectural coral buildings their telltale bulge, had been carefully scraped away. The exposed walls had been polished to a shining pink sheen. Even after sunset the house glowed softly...
Architectural coral was another gift of the ramrobots. A genetic manipulation of ordinary sea coral, it was the cheapest building material known. The only real cost was in the plastic balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral's special air-borne food. |
| Technovelgy from A Gift From Earth,
by Larry Niven. Published by Del Rey in 1968 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the house trees from The Houses of Iszm (1954) by Jack Vance.
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More Ideas
and Technology from A Gift From Earth
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and Technology by Larry Niven
Tech news articles related to A Gift From Earth
Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven
Architectural Coral-related
news articles:
- Concrete Canvas - Inflatable Concrete Buildings
- Mycotectural Buildings Made Of Fungus
- Binishells Graceful Housing
- City Made Of Bone
- Engineered Living Building Materials
- Your Martian Dream Home, Made By Fungi
- With Mycotecture, We'll Just Grow The Space Habitats We Need
| Tiny Flying Robot Weighs Just One Gram |
| Some Ringworld Configurations Are Stable |
| Darpa 'Defiant' Unmanned Autonomous Ship |
| DNA Printed Book By Isaac Asimov Now Available |
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Science Fiction
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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!'
