Wheelers (novel)

• Earth in the novel is divided into two enormous political conglomerates—those of Ecotopia and Free China. These are demarcated by the contemporary political, economic, and cultural divisions between the Western and Eastern Worlds.
• Free China shares similarities with today's People's Republic; for instance, there is an emphasis on traditional Chinese culture and medicine (the trade in poached animals for the purposes of concocting elixirs and potions from their bones is an important plot point in the novel). Further parallels to modern China include purposeful isolationism and two-way information control.

• The blimps are for the most part egalitarian on an individual basis, but their governance is handled at the topmost levels by an oligarchical group of Elders who are constantly mired in mindlessly bureaucratic detail that makes any decision a lengthy process. They are aided by administratively minded symbiauts which take the roles of secretaries and stenographers, reinforcing the council members' natural memory for bylaws and precedents.
• Blimp culture has been irrevocably shaped by the tragic loss of Firsthome, and the society at large has come to value personal safety over individualism or cosmic equanimity.
• The Instrumentality is a rebellious faction which is ostensibly concerned with the possibility that redirected comets might impact intelligent life on other planets—even Poisonblue, as they call the Earth. Despite this seeming goodwill, the blimp Halfholder comes to understand through the course of the novel that they are as much concerned with political gain as moral fortitude.
• Skydiving, or free-falling from one floating blimp city in the attempt to land on another, is an illegal activity used by rebellious groups or individuals to demonstrate against the current order. This wanton disregard for personal safety flies in the face of established protocol and is therefore considered punishable in the extreme.

Due to The Pause (a period of time in which fears over unreliable A.I. all but halted forward progress), there is a mix of far-flung futurism and relatively mundane tech.

• The Internet has been replaced by the Xnet, commonly referred to as 'the X.' Much like the 'net today, it facilitates communication, information exchange, hacking, and even personal navigation (courtesy of a GPS-like orbital tracking system).
• All citizens of Ecotopia wear wristnodes (often shortened to 'nodes) which allow personal communication and access to the Xnet, presumably through some intuitive holographic display.
• Television has been replaced by vidivid technology, or VV for short. Details are scarce, but the implication is that it, like a wristnode display, is holographic.

• Cars and trucks are the average means of travel for the citizens of Ectopia and Free China, but government agencies and elite clandestine operations may own helicopters.
• Spaceships are available, but remain expensive luxuries. Prudence Odingo owes hers, the Tiglath-Pileser, to services rendered for the Order of the Cuckoo. There is no interstellar travel in human hands, though late in the novel a system of slingshot rocks are used to propel Moses' travel to speeds far beyond those attainable by conventional engines.
• The Order itself owns a giant hollowed-out asteroid which has been made to recreate the majesty of Tibet (the original home of The Order, now under the power of Free China—much like today). Like the giant alien ship of Arthur C. Clarke's 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama, the New Tibet Habitat contains an artificial world complete with sacred mountains like Chumulangma and achieves normal gravity via centripetal force.

• The Order of the Cuckoo, who continued advancing during The Pause and who make a living shuffling around and subsequently mining large asteroids, have developed mass drivers. The novel describes these as "linear trebuchets powered by magnetic induction motors." By manipulating a gravity field with pure mass, they can alter the course of the relatively hefty pieces of iron and other metals that The Order deals in.

Blimp technology is organic in nature, and is constructed biologically using pheremones and other chemical tools.

• Blimp cities are alive. Made of the combined efforts of trillions of tiny gas-filled creatures, they are actually enormous organic colonies. Over billions of years, self-organization sets in and the masses of foam become gigantic floating platforms, trailing specialised tendrils that sift food and nutrients from the densely populated atmosphere in method similar to that of the plankton feeders of Earth's oceans. This being the case, cities can become sick (either through accident or at the hands of rebel groups like The Instrumentation) or starve of their own accord—though, like any living system, repair is possible if the issue is caught in time.
• Once the 'cities' have formed slabs, intelligent creatures like the blimps can move in and, through biochemical methods, guide the growth of buildings, roadways (for the symbiauts), and other staple civic structures.
• Blisterponds are the closest that any blimp comes to a permanent residence, and these specialised chambers can be used for short, recuperative rests or for long periods of stasis.

• An important part to the functioning of blimp society, the symbiauts are biomechanical creations that are organically constructed by and actually within the blimp body. Blimps evolved this ability after migrating to Jupiter (which they call "Secondhome") where the element-rich atmosphere necessitated the ability to filter and pass metallic waste. While blimps of old used to merely let this waste fall back into the atmosphere, the new society learned over time to guide the construction and programming of basic machines. In time, the art of offcasting (or producing a symbiaut) grew more refined, producing mobile designs with wheels (what the humans would later dub 'Wheelers') and eventually gravity drives (though vestigial wheels remained as a means of energy-conserving locomotion). By Halfholder's time, the symbiauts had become an integral part of both individual and social life.

• Through the developments precipitated by symbiaut advances, the blimps were able to remotely construct Diversion Engines inside the moons of Jupiter, which allow them to control the orbits and alignments thereof. There is little explanation of this technology, though the term "repulsion field" is tossed about.