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"...there's a great affinity between writing poetry and SF."
- Dan Simmons
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| Spherical Display | ||
| An arbitrarily large display that is a perfect sphere. |
A great way to view the universe.
| You stuck your head through and there you were; one bodiless head sticking through protruding into this dimly lit spherical space with lots of other bodiless heads – only a minority of them in any sense human.
Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre of the space. Right now the display was showing some detail of the general battle space... |
| Technovelgy from Surface Detail,
by Iain M Banks. Published by Orbit in 2010 Additional resources -
|
The same technovelgy is mentioned much earlier, in Consider Phlebas:
Compare to the computer globe from Cold Front (1946) by Hal Clement, the visiglobe from Agent of Vega (1949) by James Schmitz and the weather room from The Weather Man (1961) by Theodore L Thomas.
See also the miniature universe from Fessenden's Worlds by Edmond Hamilton, published by Weird Tales in 1937.
"In one apartment they saw rich wooden furniture, a holosphere lying broken in a corner and a glass-sided water tank the size of a room..."
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Surface Detail
More Ideas
and Technology by Iain M Banks
Tech news articles related to Surface Detail
Tech news articles related to works by Iain M Banks
Spherical Display-related
news articles:
- I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display
| Did Frank Herbert Predict Bistable Displays Like E-Ink? |
| I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display |
| Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large |
| iPhone Air Fulfils Jobs' Promise From 2007 - A Giant Screen! |
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Science Fiction
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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.'
