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"As opposed to illiteracy, where you can't read, aliteracy means that you can but you just can't be bothered. They say aliteracy is on the rise these days."
- Peter Watts
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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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'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
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Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
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'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
'...a universal cryptogram — yet it is one which can be interpreted by any intelligent creature on any planet in the Solar System!'
