4 Comments

Well, that's not good.

Also, I love the phrase bimbling about, and unrelatedly have saved the space travel calculator. Indeed the Internet can be glorious.

Expand full comment

At no point during the writing of this chapter did you think about this...

https://youtu.be/YjvFCZkoKVQ

Sci-fi geek me enjoyed the world building here... But did you just wipe out last week's author character with a failure of a freaking space elevator? Niven, Pournelle and Barnes once did a breakdown of what one of their space elevators would do to Earth under catastrophic failure... ("The Barsoom Project" - Dream Park book 2, in which their universe decided space elevators were a better bet for Mars.) they would have worked with JPL scientists on their numbers, but "planetary extinction event" is certainly accurate enough.

Someone is playing nasty in your world. So much for "Utopian."

I don't think 7Gs would "jellify" an occupant of the AI, but would certainly be fatal, fairly quickly. Since your AIs have personality they are allowed a little poetic license, and, yeah... I mean you just ratcheted up your crisis level.

Yes, space travel calculator is cool.

Expand full comment
author

That B5 episode may or may not have been in the back of my mind while writing this!

There's an amazing space elevator failure sequence in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Let's hope that doesn't happen here.

Fair point about the jellification, might tweak that.

Expand full comment

Ah, yes, I remember KSR's sequence. I've only read that trilogy once, whereas I've read the entire Dream Park series many times over, and I read that one first, so it stuck in my brain more deeply.

Expand full comment