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Gaea Trilogy
The ''Gaea Trilogy'' consists of three science fiction novels by John Varley. The stories tell of humanity's encounter with a living being in the shape of a 1,300 km diameter Stanford torus, inhabited by many different species, most notably the centaur-like Titanides, in orbit around the planet Saturn. The novels are: *''Titan'' (1979) **Nebula Award nominee, 1979; Hugo Award nominee, Locus Award ''winner'', 1980 *'' Wizard'' (1980) **Hugo and Locus Award nominees, 1981 *''Demon A demon is a malevolent supernatural entity. Historically, belief in demons, or stories about demons, occurs in religion, occultism, literature, fiction, mythology, and folklore; as well as in Media (communication), media such as comics, video ...'' (1984) **Locus Award nominee, 1985 References External links The Gaean Trilogyat Worlds Without End Gaea the Mad Titanfan site of the Gaean Trilogy Science fiction book series Science fiction novel trilogies Novels by John Varley Fiction set on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Titan (Varley Novel)
''Titan'' is a science fiction novel by American writer John Varley, the first book in his Gaea Trilogy, published in 1979. It won the 1980 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and was nominated for both the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1979, and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1980. Plot A scientific expedition to the planet Saturn in 2025, aboard the ship ''Ringmaster'', discovers a strange satellite in orbit around the planet. Commanding the ship is Cirocco Jones, a tall NASA career woman, aided by astronomer Gaby Plauget, the clone twin physicists April and August Polo, pilot Eugene Springfield, physician Calvin Greene and engineer Bill (whose last name is never given). As they reach the satellite they realize it is a huge hollow torus, a Stanford torus habitat. Before they can report this, the ship is entangled in cables from the object. The crew is rendered unconscious and later wake up inside the habitat. Initially separated, Cirroco and Gaby find each oth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wizard (novel)
''Wizard'' is a 1980 science fiction novel by American writer John Varley. It is the second book in his Gaea Trilogy. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1981. Plot summary ''Wizard'' takes place in 2100, seventy-five years after the events in ''Titan''. Cirocco has become an alcoholic, apparently due to the strain of being the ''Wizard''. Gaby Plauget has taken up the slack, carrying out special projects for Gaea such as building the Circum-Gaea Highway, in return for which she gets some of the benefits Cirocco enjoys, including apparently perpetual youth. Gaea herself is bored, spending her time in the hub with her sycophants and watches old movies. Gaea provides miracle cures to those who come to her from Earth and prove themselves worthy by doing something "heroic" – for example, travel once round the circumference of the great wheel. This provides Gaea with entertainment, as she arranges hazards for them to overcome or die trying; and by providing cu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Demon (novel)
''Demon'' is a science fiction novel by American writer John Varley, published in 1984. The third and final book in his Gaea Trilogy, it was nominated to the Locus Award. Plot ''Demon'' takes place in the years 2113 through 2121, thirteen to twenty-one years after the events of '' Wizard''. Earth is in the grip of a protracted nuclear war, possibly started by Gaea herself. Some survivors are rescued by mysterious pods called ''mercy flights'' that bring them to Gaea. They are cured of all their physical ills, but still mentally damaged from the war, they are dumped in the twilight city of Bellinzona in Dione, an anarchic place where the local brain is dead, Gaea has limited control, and criminals run the show. Due to the war, humankind's future is now in the wheel, and at the mercy of its senile ruler. Cirocco Jones has become a fugitive and resistance leader, supported by the Titanides, who call her the ''Captain,'' and the Angels, who call her the ''Wing Commander''. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Varley (author)
John Herbert Varley (born August 9, 1947) is an American science fiction writer. Biography Varley was born in Austin, Texas. He grew up in Fort Worth, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, graduated from Nederland High School—all in Texas—and went to Michigan State University on a National Merit Scholarship. He started as a physics major, switched to English, then left school before his 20th birthday and arrived in Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco just in time for the "Summer of Love" in 1967. There he worked at various unskilled jobs, depended on St. Anthony's Mission for meals, and panhandled outside the Cala Market on Stanyan Street (since closed) before deciding that writing had to be a better way to make a living. He was serendipitously present at Woodstock in 1969 when his car ran out of gas a half-mile away. He also has lived at various times in Portland and Eugene, Oregon, New York City, San Francisco again, Berkeley, and Los Angeles. Varley has writte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Berkley Books
Berkley Books is an imprint of the Penguin Group. History Berkley Books began as an independent company in 1955. It was founded as "Chic News Company" by Charles Byrne and Frederick Klein, who had worked for Avon; they quickly renamed it Berkley Publishing Co. The new name was a combination of the their surnames, unrelated to either the philosopher George Berkeley or Berkeley, California. Under their editor-in-chief Thomas Dardis, over the next few years Berkley developed a diverse line of popular fiction and non-fiction, both reprints and mass-market paperback originals, with a particularly strong history in science fiction (books of Robert A. Heinlein and Frank Herbert’s '' Dune'' novels, for example). The company was bought in 1965 by G. P. Putnam's Sons and in years to follow undertook a hardcover line under the Berkley imprint, chiefly but not only for science fiction. For example, Merle Miller’s ''Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman'' (1973), and ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanford Torus Under Construction
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considered among the most prestigious universities in the world. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost of Stanford Frederick Terman inspired and supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life, sentient artificial intelligence, cybernetics, certain forms of immortality (like mind uploading), and the singularity. Science fiction predicted several existing inventions, such as the atomic bomb, robots, and borazon, whose names entirely match their fictional predecessors. In addition, science fiction might serve as an outlet to facilitate future scientific and technological innovations. Science fiction can trace its roots to ancient mythology. It is also related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Science fiction, in literature, film, television, and other media, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanford Torus
The Stanford torus is a proposed NASA design for a space habitat capable of housing 10,000 to 140,000 permanent residents. The Stanford torus was proposed during the 1975 NASA Summer Study, conducted at Stanford University, with the purpose of exploring and speculating on designs for future space colonies (Gerard O'Neill later proposed his Island One or Bernal sphere as an alternative to the torus). "Stanford torus" refers only to this particular version of the design, as the concept of a ring-shaped rotating space station was previously proposed by Wernher von Braun and Herman Potočnik. It consists of a torus, or doughnut-shaped ring, that is 1.8 km in diameter (for the proposed 10,000 person habitat described in the 1975 Summer Study) and rotates once per minute to provide between 0.9g and 1.0g of artificial gravity on the inside of the outer ring via centrifugal force. Sunlight is provided to the interior of the torus by a system of mirrors, including a large non ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Centaur
A centaur ( ; grc, κένταυρος, kéntauros; ), or occasionally hippocentaur, is a creature from Greek mythology with the upper body of a human and the lower body and legs of a horse. Centaurs are thought of in many Greek myths as being as wild as untamed horses, and were said to have inhabited the region of Magnesia and Mount Pelion in Thessaly, the Foloi oak forest in Elis, and the Malean peninsula in southern Laconia. Centaurs are subsequently featured in Roman mythology, and were familiar figures in the medieval bestiary. They remain a staple of modern fantastic literature. Etymology The Greek word ''kentauros'' is generally regarded as being of obscure origin. The etymology from ''ken'' + ''tauros'', 'piercing bull', was a euhemerist suggestion in Palaephatus' rationalizing text on Greek mythology, ''On Incredible Tales'' (Περὶ ἀπίστων), which included mounted archers from a village called ''Nephele'' eliminating a herd of bulls that were the sco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saturn
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine and a half times that of Earth. It has only one-eighth the average density of Earth; however, with its larger volume, Saturn is over 95 times more massive. Saturn's interior is most likely composed of a core of iron–nickel alloy, iron–nickel and rock (silicon and oxygen compounds). Its core is surrounded by a deep layer of metallic hydrogen, an intermediate layer of liquid hydrogen and liquid helium, and finally, a gaseous outer layer. Saturn has a pale yellow hue due to ammonia crystals in its upper atmosphere. An electrical current within the metallic hydrogen layer is thought to give rise to Saturn's planetary magnetic field, which is weaker than Earth's, but which has a magnetic moment 580 times that of Earth due to Saturn's larger size. Saturn's magnetic field strength is around one-twentieth of Jupiter's. The out ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction Book Series
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction Novel Trilogies
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
