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"If you turn away from the natural gifts that God has given you, or the universe has given you, you're going to grow old too soon."
- Ray Bradbury
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| D-9 Motherspinner | ||
| An enormous genetically engineered spider used to create large structures in space. |
What do you do when you need a lot more spider silk for your orbital structures? Tens of thousands of miles more? Easy - you build a bigger spider.
| "My father works a D-9," she said proudly, pointing at something on the bug's back. "My god!" I said. "That's a man. Is that your father?" "No, he works on the new Eight spoke, just getting started on that one..." It took me a moment to realize that she was talking about her father's D-9 Motherspinner. I was still taken aback by the man riding the eigh-legged behemoth. Until that moment I had not known they were piloted... The rider was in a pressurized box, like a howdah strapped to the back of an elephant. It was mounted behind the basketball-sized eyes and in front of the giant black sphere of her abdomen. He looked like the operator of a big crane or shovel, and that wasn't too far off the mark. He pulled levers and turned pulleys in a competent, bussinesslike way, and the spider turned or moved forward. "The D-9's don't weave," Poly said. "They sit in one spot and start extruding silk, and smaller spiders grab those and start running with them. She can put out thousands of miles of silk at one sitting. |
| Technovelgy from The Golden Globe,
by John Varley. Published by Ace Books in 1998 Additional resources -
|
Compare to these early ideas of purposive genetic engineering, the designed bacteria from Golden Age great Raymond Z. Gallun's short story Seeds of Dusk and the manufactured monsters from H.G. Wells' 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Thanks to Erik Glenn for suggesting this item.
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
