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"I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Narrow Belt Climate | ||
| A sliver of a tidally-locked world that is inhabitable. |
This story was written in 1931; it was generally believed that the planet Mercury is tidally locked like the Moon, presenting one face to the sun.
| "...Where else is there to go-?" "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. |
| Technovelgy from Too Many Boards!,
by Harl Vincent. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Compare to ribbon world from The Mule (1945), part of Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov.
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Tech news articles related to Too Many Boards!
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Narrow Belt Climate-related
news articles:
- The New Habitable Zones Include Asimov's Ribbon Worlds
| Beautiful Visualization of Dawn Spacecraft |
| Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars |
| Tentacled Robot Captures Space Debris |
| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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'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...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
