2012 got me no Hugo nomination in 2013

[james_davis_nicoll]

But you know what it did get me? From Rapture of the Nerds:

It’s called a Nicoll-Dyson beam—a laser weapon powered by a star—and just one of them is capable of evaporating an Earth-sized planet a thousand light-years away in half an hour flat.

So there's that. (it takes a week to evaporate an Earth-sized world with the combined power of a Sun-like star, boo hiss, but to make up for it the range is more like one million light-years)

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Wow, you can hold the beam together a lot better even than Kimball Kinnison could; the ability to direct it to a planet of some other star was just a gleam in the eye of Laverne Thorndyke.