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"In science fiction one can say a great many things that are unpalatable, … because it's expressed as science fiction you can slip it past their defenses."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Lunar Advertisement | ||
| An 'ad' on the lunar surface that can be seen by its audience on Earth. |
It started out as a perfectly innocent experiment, meant to add to the store of human knowledge. Just an extension of an experiment tried on Earth, or rather in the atmosphere high above the surface. Sodium ejected at a high altitude dispersed in a scientifically useful manner.
| "...The
sodium cloud will be completely invisible while it’s rising up through
the darkness of the Moon’s shadow.
Then, quite suddenly, it will flash
into brilliance as it enters the sun’s
rays, which are streaming past over
our heads right now as we stare
up into space. No one is quite sure
how bright it will be, but it’s a
pretty safe guess that you’ll be able
to see it in any telescope bigger
than a two-inch. So it should just
be within the range of a good pair
of binoculars...”
Then a sudden yellow glow began to spread across the sky, like a vast and unwavering aurora that became brighter even as we watched. It was as if an artist was sprawling strokes across the stars with a flame-filled brush. And as I stared at those strokes, I suddenly realized that someone had brought off the greatest advertising coup in history. For the strokes formed letters, and the letters formed two words — the name of a certain soft drink too well-known to need any further publicity from me. How had it been done? The first answer was obvious. Someone had placed a suitable cut stencil in the nozzle of the sodium bomb, so that the stream of escaping vapor had shaped itself to the words. Since there was nothing to distort it, the pattern had kept its shape during its invisible ascent to the stars. I had seen sky-writing on Earth, but this was something on a far larger scale. The next morning, every newspaper on the planet carried that famous photo of the crescent Moon with the luminous slogan painted across its darkened sector. The letters were visible, before they finally dispersed into space, for over an hour. By that time the words were almost a thousand miles long, and were beginning to get blurred. |
| Technovelgy from Watch This Space,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1957 Additional resources -
|
Thanks to Winchell Chung for suggesting this item in a comment sixteen years ago!
Compare to atmospheric advertising from In the Year 2889 (1889) by Jules Verne, the Orbiting Casino Advertising Sign from One Against The Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson and the permanent skywriting from Soap Opera (1953) by Alan Nelson.
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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
