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"Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws."
- Robert Heinlein

Caliban Beachball  
  Dwelling place for unusual lifeform who make jumpdoors possible.  

A jumpdoor is an energy passageway that allows a person to move from one part of the galaxy to another instantly. If you're thinking that this takes star-sized energy, you're right.

The beachball was some six meters in diameter. It sat solidly on the [lava] shelf, about half a meter of its bottom surface hidden by a depression in the rock, as though it had melted out a resting place.

Knobs and indentations marked the opaque metallic surface.

Technovelgy from Whipping Star, by Frank Herbert.
Published by Galaxy Publishing in 1969
Additional resources -

How do you let the Caliban know you've come to call? "Find a 'nippled extrusion' and you knock on it."

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Whipping Star
  More Ideas and Technology by Frank Herbert
  Tech news articles related to Whipping Star
  Tech news articles related to works by Frank Herbert

Articles related to Living Space
AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home
With Mycotecture, We'll Just Grow The Space Habitats We Need
Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast
LiquidView Ersatz Windows, ala Philip K. Dick

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Science Fiction in the News

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'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'

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'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'

Anthropic's Claude AI Creates Legal Citation From Whole Cloth
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Students Vie For Lunar Regolith Mining Robot Prize
'About time you got here,' the astronaut said.

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'...using a neutralizing electronic impulse.'

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'...the Hole is something like a vortex or a whirlpool?'

Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'

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'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'

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