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"The answer to the problem of information overload on the Net is reputations… engineer a system called a reputation server."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Orbiting Penal Colony | ||
| A prison placed in orbit (better than Alcatraz). |
Better than an island prison? Given that space travel is not an easy option for anyone, you would just need to control ship access very carefully. Then, relax; where can they go? Alcatraz was created with a similar idea in mind; put the prison in some sort of void that is difficult to traverse (San Francisco bay). Of course, the ultimate island prison - Australia.
| Up in the orbiting penal colony he slept, unaware of anything. Time had passed, days and weeks and then months and years, and he kept sleeping that long sleep. Suspended in a coffin like plastic cubicle in the great orbiting prison that passed endlessly around the Earth, passing over Greater Los Angeles again and again. |
| Technovelgy from Tekwar,
by William Shatner. Published by Ace/Putnam in 1989 Additional resources -
|
Forced hibernation added to the security; prisoners can't riot or harm each other if they are asleep.
Compare to the asteroid prison from One Against the Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson, the Alcatraz of Space from Reunion on Ganymede (1938) by Clifford Simak, the Moon as prison from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert Heinlein, zero-time jail from A World Out of Time (1976) by Larry Niven and Brainlock from Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) by William Gibson.
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
