Coriopolis — the first — 80 km × 20 km
Twenty kilometers of ground, rolled into a cylinder and spun until it holds. Walk to the far side of the valley and it doesn't end. It climbs, hazes blue, and closes over your head.
Thousands of them are turning above Earth now. This is the one they all descend from.
Looking down the axis of Coriopolis — one turn every 201 seconds, 313 meters per second at the floor.
Every peculiarity of life inside a gyrealm falls out of the same few decisions: make it big, make it spin, and light it yourself.
Geometry
You live on the inside. The land doesn't fall away at the edge of sight — it rises on both hands, thins to blue, and hangs twenty kilometers above your head, right side up to whoever is standing on it.
The first gyrealmDynamics
Falling means moving outward, into a wider circle that has to travel faster to keep up. So dropped things land east of your feet. Rising drifts west. Walk west and you weigh a little more. Scimitar Falls is named for the curve its water takes on the way down.
Scimitar FallsOptics
Broadband quantum dots across the sky shell paint sunlight, moonlight and stars to a schedule. Real space is visible in exactly one direction — through the thick radiation glass at the ends of the cylinder, where the day stops and the dark starts.
How a gyrealm worksIndustry
The Works is a manufacturing ecosystem that also manufactures itself — mines, refineries and assemblers that make more mines, refineries and assemblers. A habitat's structure goes up in weeks. Teaching it to hold an ecosystem takes rather longer.
The autopoietic industryThe one thing in short supply
Every one of them is filled with air that used to be Earth's.
The Works can pull almost anything it needs from rock already out here. Not nitrogen. Four fifths of a habitat's atmosphere is lifted out of the atmosphere of the planet below, and none of it comes back. It is cheaper to live up here than down there, which is why the argument is hard: the gain is immediate and personal, and the loss is slow and belongs to no one.
Why nitrogen is the bottleneckThe wikiLive — and growing
Places, technology, science, culture and events, written from inside. Start with the cylinder itself, the transport that threads it, or the faith that grew up around the physics.
Open the wikiThe storiesIn progress
The first pieces are being written. The workbench is already open: one sunrise at Scimitar Falls, rendered six times in six novelists' voices, to find out which one this world wants to be told in.
Read the six dawnsMediaUnder construction
A world this specific is worth looking at and listening to. Audio, video and visual work will land here as it's made.
Media