Urban theorist, real-estate magnate, and avid kriegball player best known for his quip, “Why fight nature when you can just buy it out?”

Voron Belthaszar designed and financed many planned communities both celebrated and denounced for their fabulous expense and apparent defiance of natural law (or “that whore Physics”), always using the very latest materials and often depending on continuous power input to stabilize their structure. Belthaszar’s communities tended toward the self-contained (his detractors would say “isolated”) and often occupied easily-defensible positions such as mountain peaks, islands, or (in the celebrated case of the Elsoni Starsnare) the top of a whimsically-constructed tower stretching into the upper atmosphere.

Unjustly discredited in the wake of the Arcological Mania fed by his overzealous followers, Belthaszar’s ideas enjoyed a late rehabilitiation during the height of the Parallax Urgency. A sympathetic reading of his major theoretical work The Radiant Garden reveals an ambitious and far-seeing thinker who anticipated many of the issues that would confront Viridian society in later generations.

—Thucydides Plutonium