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"The trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind."
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This general idea is also discussed in Too Many Boards!, a 1931 story by Harl Vincent, referring to the planet Mercury and the belief that it is tidally locked like the Moon, presenting one face to the sun:
"Mercury!"
"Larry! It has a terrible climate and is — oh — uncivilized. Besides, its government is unrecognized by
the Tri-planetary Alliance. We'd be exiles in an awful
land where we could never live in peace."
"Honey — listen ! It's just the opposite. I've a very
good friend, Chic Davis, who's captain of the Rocket
III, one of the Tri-planetarian liners. He tells me
Mercury is the finest of all the inhabited bodies. It's
terrifically hot on the side always toward the sun and
frigid on the other, but there's a narrow belt where the
climate is moderate — semi-tropical by earthly standards.
And it's not uncivilized, but highly cultured...
The huge blood-red disc of the sun shone hotly at the
horizon, its almost horizontal rays making of the city
a motley of sweltering high lights and dark shadows.
Rose tinted mists hung low over all, effectually obscuring the heavens above. It was always thus in Luzan,
the sun never leaving the horizon entirely, but circling
it once in every, eighty-eight earth days and alternately
rising to a point that exposed the lower rim of the
enormous disc, then sinking to a point where the topmost edge just peeped through the mists above the
undulating line of demarcation between land and sky.
Apparently, Mercury is tidally locked, but at a 3:2 ratio, so it does not present the same face to the sun.
See also terminator zone from Exiles of the Moon (1931) by Schachner and Zagat. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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The FLUTE Project - A Huge Liquid Mirror In Space
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'Tell me your torments,' the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion.
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'...a slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body no larger than a football.'
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'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
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'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
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'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
Splendid View Of Eclipse From Orbit Visualized And Repurposed By Arthur C. Clarke
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
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