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"Writing about the future, I have a vested interest in there being a future for me to write about."
- John Brunner
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| Nanotech Buildings | ||
| Enormous buildings built with nanotech fibers. |
The scale of the buildings is left to the reader's imagination. However, if nanotechnology provides us with materials that combine exceptional strength with lightness, buildings can grow much taller.
| We were uncertain how you might feel about new buildings.
You mean the nano tech buildings? Layne had been struggling to keep his eyes open.
Yes some people find them disturbing. He knew their sheer brutality of scale from constructs, but virtually had failed to convey the peculiarity of their apparent texture, a streamlined organicism. They are like Giger's paintings of New York, Yamazaki had said but the reference had been lost on Laney. Now he sat on the edge of his bed staring blankly out at these miracles of the new technology, as banal and as sinister as such miracles usually were, and they were only annoying; the world's largest inhabited structures. |
| Technovelgy from Idoru,
by William Gibson. Published by Putnam in 1996 Additional resources -
|
If we ever get the one-dimensional diamond crystals that Arthur C. Clarke dreamed about for building a space elevator, we might get nanotech buildings.
For another look at life in very large structures, see the reference to arcology, from Oath of Fealty, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
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'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
'...then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
