User blog comment:Unownshipper/Metallurgists Wanted: Rapture's Natural Resources/@comment-8299550-20140811221953

Just for clarification, this is the mention of Ryanium in John Shirley's "Bioshock:Rapture". Unfortunately, Google Books isn't making this easier by removing pages in the search, so I'm skimming rather quickly. Funnily, Google Books auto-corrects it to "Uranium".

Page 91

"Nothing but glass, holding out all that water?" Bill marveled. "We're down fair deep! All that bloody great pressure...!

"I'm not ready to share all my secrets with you yet, Bill, but that is in fact a perfect merging of glass-and metal. Something new called submolecular bonding. Astonishingly pressure resistent. Expensive, but worth every cent."

Page 88

The dome was about two hundred feet in diameter, about thirty-five feet to the ceiling in the center, which was supported by a grid of metal girders. To Bill the girders looked like steel, but he knew if they were only steel they'd all be buried under a mountain of saltwater. He supposed they must be made of some special alloy.

Page 90

Bill leaned out of the tram and saw that the walls here were transparent-they were a heavy, polished glass of some kind banded with metal. Light shone upward from electric lamps on the seabed outside the transparent section. He could see the tunnel, mostly cement, occasionally glass, wending out across the seabed toward the framework of Rapture.

Page 94

"Look there!" Bill pointed to the thin coating of water over the amalgam floor.[...]

"Didn't you say that water pressure wasn't a problem...?" Bill asked, examing the curved walls of the tunnel more closely.

"Well, these tunnels aren't entirely made of the new alloy-it's tremendously expensive to make. We keep most of that back for Rapture itself. Only the support ribs...But they should be enough, when you consider the steel mesh in the concrete, the doubling of-"

Page 125

Elaine's tastes didn't run to the rococo exess found in so much of Rapture. She had chosen simple lines, craftsman-style furnishings: curving dark wood, polished redwood tables, silver-framed mirrors. A smiling portrait of Bill-his mustache curling up, his russet hair starting to recede-hung over the shark-leather living room sofa. Materials found in the undersea environs around Rapture were being increasingly used in furnishings-locally mined metals, many-hued corals for tabletops and counters, glass from deep-sea sands, even beams and brass from sunken ships.

The curving window of the viewing alcove, the glass arching over them sectioned by frames of Ryanium alloy, looked out on a deep channel between towrering buildings.

Pages 348-349 Footsteps echoing, she wandered through the livid colored light of Rapture; she rambled past pistons pumping mysteriously in wall niches, past the steaming pools of the baths, under iridescent panes of crystal, through the high-ceilinged atriums of brass and gold and chrome, vast chambers that seemed as grandiose as any palace ballroom. A palace, that's what Rapture seemed to her, an ornate palace of Ryanium and glass, swallowed by the sea- which was ever so slowly digesting it.