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"the [science fiction] writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true...and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Ribbon World | ||
| A planet that presents the same face to its sun has a small habitable area - the ribbon between light and dark. |
| Radole was a small world – and, in military potential, perhaps the weakest of the twenty-seven. That, by the way, was another factor in the logic of the choice. It was a ribbon world – of which the Galaxy boasts sufficient, but among which, the inhabited variety is a rarity for the physical requirements are difficult to meet. It was a world, in other words, where the two halves face the monotonous extremes of heat and cold, while the region of possible life is the girdling ribbon of the twilight zone. Such a world invariably sounds uninviting to those who have not tried it, but there exist spots, strategically placed – and Radole City was located in such a one. It spread along the soft slopes of the foothills before the hacked-out mountains that backed it along the rim of the cold hemisphere and held off the frightful ice. The warm, dry air of the sun-half spilled over, and from the mountains was piped the water-and between the two, Radole City became a continuous garden, swimming in the eternal morning of an eternal June. |
| From Foundation and Empire,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1952 Additional resources -
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'See Vee Threepio - Vee for versatility - at your service...'
'Three and a half centimetres in diameter, permanently fixed in the centre of his forehead.'
"They were half way home when a single flyer, hopping free in a copter harness, approached the little parade."
'...moving with such drifting ease that it was like a single solid cloud of black-grey smoke blown at him in silence.' Almost.
