The smoke ring
In the free-fall environment of the Smoke Ring, the descendants of the crew of the Disciplineno longer remembered their Earth roots -- or the existence of Sharls Davis Kendy, the computer-program despot of the ship. Until Kendy initiated contact once more. Fourteen years later, only Jeffer, the Citizens Tree Scientist, knew that Kendy was still watching -- and waiting. Then the Citizens Tree people rescued a family of loggers and learned for the first time of the Admiralty, a large society living in free fall amid the floating debris called the Clump. And it was likely that the Admiralty had maintained, intact, Discipline's original computer library. Exploration was a temptation neither Jeffer nor Kendy could resist, and neither Citizens Tree nor Sharls Davis Kendy would ever be the same again...
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What Hacker News says
- Or, more directly, Niven’s “The Smoke Ring” about humans living directly in an oxygenated accretion disk around a white dwarf.
- As Larry Niven wrote in The Smoke Ring and The Integral Trees...
"West takes you In, In takes you East, East takes you Out, Out takes you West, North and South bring you back again."
- It's like a bit from The Smoke Ring (or Integral Trees) by Larry Niven, where a very weird planetary configuration made a human-habitable ecosystem out of an orbiting ring of gas. [0]
The locals refer to "East" as in the direction of orbit (prograde), "In" as towards the central star, and teach their children: "East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East, North and South take you back."
[0] https://kaiserscience.wordpress.com/physics/gravity/physics-...
- Forward is the author :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward#Fiction
note wrt to comment elsewhere in this thread that Forward was also involved with physical aspects of the Integral Trees/Smoke Ring world build.
