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Matter (novel)
''Matter'' is a science fiction novel from Iain M. Banks set in his Culture universe. It was published on 25 January 2008. ''Matter'' was a finalist for the 2009 Prometheus Award. Creation From an interview with ''The Guardian'' newspaper at the Hay Literary Festival on 25 May 2007: Banks tells me that he has spent the past three months writing another Culture novel. It will be called Matter and is to be published next February. "It's a real shelf-breaker," he says enthusiastically. "It's 204,000 words long and the last 4,000 consist of appendices and glossaries. It's so complicated that even in its complexity it's complex. I'm not sure the publishers will go for the appendices, but readers will need them. It's filled with neologisms and characters who disappear for 150 pages and come back, with lots of flashbacks and -forwards. And the story involves different civilizations at different stages of technological evolution. There's even one group who have disappeared up ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
WikiProject Novels
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is an affinity group for contributors with shared goals within the Wikimedia movement. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within Wikimedia project, sibling projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by ''Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian'' for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000". On Wikipedia Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outsi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bibliography
Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliography'' as a word having two senses: one, a list of books for further study or of works consulted by an author (or enumerative bibliography); the other one, applicable for collectors, is "the study of books as physical objects" and "the systematic description of books as objects" (or descriptive bibliography). Etymology The word was used by Greek writers in the first three centuries CE to mean the copying of books by hand. In the 12th century, the word started being used for "the intellectual activity of composing books." The 17th century then saw the emergence of the modern meaning, that of description of books. Currently, the field of bibliography has expanded to include studies that consider the book as a material object. Bibliography, i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novacon
Novacon is an annual science fiction convention, usually held each November in the English Midlands The Midlands is the central region of England, to the south of Northern England, to the north of southern England, to the east of Wales, and to the west of the North Sea. The Midlands comprises the ceremonial counties of Derbyshire, Herefordshi .... Launched in 1971, it has been hosted by the Birmingham Science Fiction Group since 1972. List of Novacons (*Attendance figures taken from individual programme books and may not reflect the final figures; for instance, more than 500 people attended Novacon 14.) References {{Reflist External links Novacon websiteBirmingham SF Group website Science fiction conventions in the United Kingdom November Autumn in England History of Birmingham, West Midlands ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Missing In Action
Missing in action (MIA) is a casualty (person), casualty classification assigned to combatants, military chaplains, combat medics, and prisoner of war, prisoners of war who are reported missing during wartime or ceasefire. They may have been killed in action, killed, Wounded in action, wounded, prisoner of war, captured, capital punishment, executed, or Desertion, deserted. If deceased, neither their remains nor grave have been positively identified. Becoming MIA has been an occupational risk for as long as there has been warfare. Problems and solutions Until around 1912, service personnel in most countries were not routinely issued with Dog tag (identifier), ID tags. As a result, if someone was killed in action and their body was not recovered until much later, there was often little or no chance of identifying the remains unless the person in question was carrying items that would identify them, or had marked their clothing or possessions with identifying information. Start ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Antimatter
In modern physics, antimatter is defined as matter composed of the antiparticles (or "partners") of the corresponding subatomic particle, particles in "ordinary" matter, and can be thought of as matter with reversed charge and parity, or going backward in time (see CPT symmetry). Antimatter occurs in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radioactive decay, but only a tiny fraction of these have successfully been bound together in experiments to form antiatoms. Minuscule numbers of antiparticles can be generated at particle accelerators, but total artificial production has been only a few nanograms. No Macroscopic scale, macroscopic amount of antimatter has ever been assembled due to the extreme cost and difficulty of production and handling. Nonetheless, antimatter is an essential component of widely available applications related to beta decay, such as positron emission tomography, radiation therapy, and industrial imaging. In theory, a particle and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dyson Sphere
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy. The first modern imagining of such a structure was by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel '' Star Maker'' (1937). The concept was later explored by the physicist Freeman Dyson in his 1960 paper "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation". Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the escalating energy needs of a technological civilization and would be a necessity for its long-term surviva ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Planet
An artificial planet (also planetary replica and replica planet) is a proposed circumstellar megastructure with sufficient mass to generate its own gravity field strong enough to prevent atmosphere from escaping, though the term has sometimes been used to describe other types of megastructures with self-sufficient ecosystems. The concept of an artificial planet appears in many works of science fiction. Science Artificial planet Mark Hempsell suggests that an artificial planet could be created in the Solar System in preparation for future space colonization, most likely in the habitable zone between the orbits of Venus and Mars. It could evolve from a smaller artificial space habitat. Its purpose would be similar to that of other megastructures intended as living spaces (such as the O'Neill cylinder) or to that of colonizing (or terraforming) existing planets. Unlike a space habitat, an artificial planet would be large enough to create its own gravity field, which would prev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shellworld
A shellworld is any of several types of hypothetical megastructures: *A planet or a planetoid turned into series of concentric matryoshka doll-like layers supported by massive pillars. A shellworld of this type features prominently in Iain M. Banks' novel ''Matter''. *A megastructure consisting of multiple layers of shells suspended above each other by orbital rings supported by hypothetical mass stream technology. This type of shellworld can be theoretically suspended above any type of stellar body, including planets, gas giants, stars and black holes. The most massive type of shellworld could be built around supermassive black hole A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (). Black holes are a class of astronomical ...s at the center of galaxies. *An inflated canopy holding high pressure air around an otherwise airl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Steep Approach To Garbadale
''The Steep Approach to Garbadale'' is a novel by the Scottish writer Iain Banks, published in 2007. The novel had at least two working titles, ''Matter'' and ''Empire!'' Plot introduction The book describes the Wopuld family, who made a fortune on a board game called ''Empire!'', now a successful computer game. A US firm, the Spraint Corporation, wants to buy them out. Plot summary Alban McGill, a member of the Wopuld family, has sold most of his shares in the family firm, and resigned from his job in the company to become a forester, but has had to retire on medical grounds because of vibration white finger, white finger. He is distracted from affairs of business by his relations with his family and with his teenage love, his first cousin Sophie. McGill is approached by another cousin, Fielding, to help prevent the sale of the family company to the American Spraint Corporation. He also seeks a resolution of certain questions about his family background, and closure of his re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Technological Evolution
The term "technological evolution" captures explanations of technological change that draw on mechanisms from evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology was originally described in ''On the Origin of Species'' by Charles Darwin. In the style of this catchphrase, technological evolution can be used to describe the origin of new technologies. Combinatoric theory of technological change The combinatoric theory of technological change states that every technology always consists of simpler technologies, and a new technology is made of already existing technologies. One notion of this theory is that this interaction of technologies creates a network. All the technologies which interact to form a new technology can be thought of as complements, such as a screwdriver and a screw which by their interaction create the process of screwing a screw. This newly formed process of screwing a screw can be perceived as a technology itself and can therefore be represented by a new node in the netw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flashforward
A flashforward (also spelled flash-forward, and more formally known as prolepsis) is a scene that temporarily takes the narrative forward in time from the current point of the story in literature, film, television and other media. Flashforwards are often used to represent events expected, projected, or imagined to occur in the future. They may also reveal significant parts of the story that have not yet occurred, but soon will in greater detail. It is similar to foreshadowing, in which future events are not shown but rather implicitly hinted at. It is also similar to an ellipsis, which takes the narrative forward and is intended to skim over boring or uninteresting details, for example the aging of a character. It is primarily a postmodern narrative device, named by analogy to the more traditional flashback, which reveals events that occurred in the past. Literature An early example of prolepsis which predates the postmodern period is Charles Dickens' 1843 novella '' A Chr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flashback (narrative)
A flashback, more formally known as analepsis, is an interjected scene (fiction), scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the Plot (narrative), story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory. In the opposite direction, a flashforward (or prolepsis) reveals events that will occur in the future. Both flashback and flashforward are used to cohere a story, develop a character, or add structure to the narrative. In literature, internal analepsis is a flashback to an earlier point in the narrative; external analepsis is a flashback to a time before the narrative started. In film, flashbacks depict the subjective experience of a character by showing a memory of a previous event and they are often used to "resolve an enigma". Flashbacks are important in film noir and melodrama films. In films and television, several camera techniques, editing approaches and special e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
