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"The SF approach: an awareness that things could have been different, that this is one of many possible worlds, that if you came to this world from some other planet, this would be a science fiction world."
- Neal Stephenson
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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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'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!'
'It seems that at one time computers were designed directly by human beings.'
'...the spot was a lonely one in an uncharted region, far from the normal lanes of space traffic.'
