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"I believe in limited government, and the 20th century has been the century of government. The data is uniform. The government has failed at every single task it has set out to do, with the exception of waging war."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Absolute 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. |
| 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 black coating from E.E. 'Doc Smith's 1939 novel Gray Lensman.
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'Chain of hotels that specialized in non-human service.'
'But then... not every bulldozer operator works on the Moon.'
'Griff found the white and pink map distracting and switched it off using his tongue mouse.'
'Jimmy Cardigan and Harlowe, staring through the darkside port, had their feet in the foot-loops...'
'But the rising sign, as it had been designed to do, held his eyes. A vast circle of scarlet stars came up into the greenish desert dusk.'
'A lightning pilot possibly could land that tin toy without power and still walk away from it provided he had the skill to play Skip-to-M’Lou in and out of the atmosphere...'
'It was you who betrayed me — you and your robot cat.'
'with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing sunbeam...'
