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"in 1974 I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane."
- Philip K. Dick
 |
| Extreme Black | ||
| A material so absolutely black that it absorbed all incident light. |
Here's the quote about the stuntship whose sole purpose was to fly into the sun to provide spectacular effects for a rock concert.
| "That," he said, "that... is really bad for the eyes."
It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it. "It's so... black!" said Ford Prefect. "You can hardly make out its shape... light just seems to fall into it!" The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it. "Your eyes just slide off it..." said Ford in wonder. |
| Technovelgy from Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
by Douglas Adams. Published by Not known in 1980 Additional resources -
|
The earliest reference to this idea (that I can find, anyway) is the absolute black from Jack London's 1903 short story The Shadow and the Flash.
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'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
