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"In 1970 I found little difficulty staying 30 years ahead of the man in the street, and now I find it difficult to stay 18 months ahead of the man on the street."
- Vernor Vinge
 |
| City of Glass | ||
| An entire city made of unique structural glass and ceramic. |
In the story, the young of an intelligent species must be born in the sunlight on their jungle planet.
| “Your city—I saw very tall buildings. Of what do you build them?”
“In your tongue, glass,” Tanub said. “The engineers of the Delphinus said it was impossible. As you saw, they are wrong.” Stetson’s voice came hissing on the carrier wave: “A glass-blowing culture! That’d explain a lot of things.” A glowing of many lights grew visible through the giant tree trunks. It brightened as the sled crept through the jungle’s edge and emerged in cleared land looking across about two kilometers of open space at the city. Orne stared upward in awe. The Gienahn city fluted and spiraled into the moonlit sky, taller than the tallest trees. It appeared a fragile lacery of bridges, glowing columns and winking dots of light. The bridges wove back and forth from column to column until the entire visible network seemed one gigantic dew-glittering web. “All that with glass,” Orne murmured. |
| Technovelgy from The Godmakers,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Berkley Medallion in 1972 Additional resources -
|
Compare to tower of glass from Tower of Glass (1970) by Robert Silverberg, metalloglass from Buck Rogers, 2430 AD (1929) by Nowlan and Calkins and plani-glass from Crystalized Thought (1937) by Nat Schachner.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Godmakers
More Ideas
and Technology by Frank Herbert
Tech news articles related to The Godmakers
Tech news articles related to works by Frank Herbert
City of Glass-related
news articles:
- 3D Printed Glass Uses Stereolithography Techniques
| Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly |
| Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer |
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| FlexRAM Liquid Metal RAM And One Particular SF Movie Robot |
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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
