23. The tale of the talking skull, like the king’s horse, is a genuine oral tradition of long standing, brought to our attention by New York Times correspondent Paul Helou. Thanks also to Art McAvinue for some helpful insights into Tam’s reactions when the absorbic outlet hits the fan.

24. Pancakes (dark rings circling dark stars), also known as “Pellegrino’s Pancakes,” are turning out to be quite real, and may in fact be more abundant than stars.

25. The battle within the Sun is, of course, pure fiction, constrained only by the hard facts of magnetic field projection, solar physics, and orbital mechanics. The absorbic bomb, through which energy can be converted instantaneously into matter (the inverse of a conventional nuclear explosion) does not yet exist, and may never exist unless, according to Powell and Pellegrino, a sufficient number of magnetic monopoles can be found, or created in atomic accelerators and brought together in just the right geometry to produce … Well, perhaps we’re all better off not dwelling on how to create this particular nightmare.

26. The ghost universe of neutrinos—reality. Born in reactions involving the so-called “weak force” that governs the decay of atomic nuclei, their interactions with all other matter in the universe are weak—so weak that at night, while you sleep, a constant spray of neutrinos emanating from the Sim’s core passes through the Earth before coming up through your floor. At lightspeed, the spray passes through you and your bed before exiting through the ceiling toward the stars. The trick of generating a neutrino telescope is to capture a few of that very rare minority of neutrinos that happen to stop short in a brick, or in your body, or in a tub of dry cleaning fluid. The trick works only if there are lots of neutrinos, and the fusion reactions at the Sun’s core do indeed provide us with lots of them. Every second, more than 100 billion neutrinos are passing through the period at the end of this sentence.

27. The story of frozen Tritonian seas, subsurface liquid nitrogen reservoirs, cryovolcanoes, warm and wet regions inside the asteroid parent bodies, oceans inside ice worlds and the implications of 1 Billion b.c. meltings for the history of the outer solar system were first proposed by Pellegrino and Stoff and (except for their once very hot but very wrong speculation about still-existent liquid nitrogen oceans on Triton) have been rendered real by the Voyager space probes.
28. Space colonies—very likely. They’ll come in many shapes and sizes, including hollowed-out asteroids, spinning to produce centrifugal gravitysimulation. Macrolife (Zebrowski, 1979) was a pioneering science fiction novel about space colonies, and still unequalled for the thoroughness with which it presented and developed the concept, about which Arthur C. Clarke wrote in Profiles of the Future: “… space habitats, in escalating degrees of megalomania, see my Rendezvous with Rama, Larry Niven’s Ringworld, Bob Shaw’s Orbitsville and George Zebrowski’s Macrolife…”.

29. The sights and sounds experienced during a paranoid descent into Neptune: No one knows for sure how close these are to reality. The temperature and pressure regimes of Neptune, and the attendant geochemical manifestations, are based upon calculations by Pellegrino and Stoff and can at best be considered real possibilities. The various pressure phases of ice are real, having actually been produced in the laboratory using diamond anvils. The pressure analogies provided by Sharon (the force exerted by a water-strider’s foot on the surface of a pond … a fist against a skull during a karate strike) are real.