Appearance in Novels
- Two books describe attempts to destroy Orbitals:
- Vavatch Orbital (an Orbital being strategically abandoned by the Culture due to the Idiran war) is the setting for a large part of Consider Phlebas. Vavatch's circumference of fourteen million kilometres and width of thirty-five thousand kilometres - significantly larger than most Orbitals built by the Culture - also produce greater simulated gravity. Vavatch also does not provide the Culture's typical omnipresent hub mind assistance.
- Masaq' Orbital is the main setting for Look to Windward. The hub mind of Masaq' was previously the ship Lasting Damage, and is both tormented by its actions during the Idiran-Culture War as well as the main target of another faction seeking revenge on the Culture.
- Jernau Morat Gurgeh sets off from Chiark Orbital in The Player of Games on his quest to play Azad.
- Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh sets off from Dinyol-hei Orbital in Surface Detail on her mission for the Quietudinal Service.
Read more about this topic: Orbital (The Culture)
Famous quotes containing the words appearance and/or novels:
“February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)