WYRMLOG

Drives Spinning Up

Tuesday July 27th 2010

I have recovered enough from my devil-cold (which was almost certainly a case of the flu) to return to work, although I'm still not at 100%. My ears are still blocked and my sinuses are making an entertaining array of whistling, knocking and ticking sounds every time I blow my nose.

As well as going through six boxes of tissues in as many days my enforced break allowed me to devote some time to the FreakWiki. I'm slowly getting all the missing pages up and expanding the biography pages, which are the hardest of all to do (Miki has now been detailed). I also now have in my possession hard copies of all the published material, which helps.

I also finally braced myself to create the much needed page for Internet Jesus/Space Daddy himself. You can see how I chickened out here.

That is all.

PLAGUE!!

Saturday July 24th 2010

Have been laid up in bed since Wednesday with the devil-cold from hell. I've had tremendous trouble staying awake for more than two hours at a time, and my sinuses appear to have been stuffed with mustard when I wasn't looking.

Needless to say this has put a crimp in all and any plans I had for my week.

*sigh*

New Words

Thursday July 15th 2010

Back in the 1940's a Greek city planner by the name of Constantinos Doxiadis came up with some very useful words for science fiction writers. He wasn't actually trying to help out the sci-fi field, it just happened that his terms to describe cities larger than any ever seen on Earth are exactly the kind of thing you need to spice up your space-opera epic. The words in question are "Eperopolis" and "Ecumenopolis", meaning respectively a city that takes up an entire continent (think perhaps of Mega City One from Judge Dredd) and a city that takes up an entire planet (such as Trantor from Asimov's Foundation series, Coruscant from Star Wars or Holy Terra from Warhammer 40k).

Now that's well and good, but what if your city takes up more than a single planet?

At this point I'm sure everyone's going "Well how does that work? How can a city be larger than the planet it's on?" and that's a fair question. A single city spanning more than one planet just isn't possible. Unless the civilisation that built it has technology allowing cheap, reliable, instantaneous interplanetary travel. Think about it. You wake up in your apartment in Earth City, get ready for work, walk down the street to the local Portal, and step through to Mars City, where you catch a hover bus to your office. If travel between the two ecumenopoli is so quick and easy they'd function as a single entity.

So what to call such an interplanetary urban conglomeration?

I suggest an Iliopolis, from rather dodgy Greek for "Sun City" - that is a city on multiple planets orbiting the same star.

Well, that's fine, but what if the technology can stretch to cities across multiple star systems? Well then let's call it an Asteriopolis (Star City). A city spread across multiple planets in multiple star systems.

Beyond that it's asteriopoli all the way down (or up). You could probably come up with a term for galaxy spanning cities, but since we don't even have a single eperopolis yet I think the problem can wait a while. Fans of scale may want to talk about Megasteropoli for cities that span a hundred or more star systems, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go.

Iliopolis and Asteriopolis. Use them today!

From the WA Today Website...

Saturday July 10th 2010

Twilight books!

(Hey, it's Saturday and I'm at work. I have to find my amusements where I can)