Sublime

underground tests on Mercury is to blast out a large cave on the planet to serve as a future Mercury base. This is clearly the most economical way of conducting an engineering project of this kind.”

Bruce Sterling, whose ‘Shaper/Mechanist’ sequence

In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the

“You shouldn’t be talking about a new

Joan D. Vinge wrote about a demarchist society in her enjoyable pacey novel The Outcasts of Heaven Belt.