I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media.
The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen.
He broke open the first of the meal packets, and inspected it without enthusiasm. The name on the label – SPACETASTIES – was enough to put him off. And he had grave doubts about the promise printed underneath: ‘Guaranteed crumbless’.
For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others.
Dr. Brown considered all engineers to be nothing more than glorified carpenters and plumbers.
We wanted you to have a feel for the size of your habitat, in case you needed that to be more comfortable with the design process.
The time has come,” said Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch to his old friend Heywood Floyd, “to talk of many things. Of shoes and spaceships and sealing wax, but mostly of monoliths and malfunctioning computers.
One hemisphere was a giant bull’s-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometer-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space.
They found it hard to imagine the smog-choked cities of the Twentieth Century, and the waste, greed, and appalling environmental disasters of the Oil Age.
Tranquillity was not a state of mind that could be sustained for long.
Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that was almost an article of faith among scientists.
One sample is poor statistics, my math prof used to say.
Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.
Reliability depended on redundancy and automatic checking, and human intervention was much more likely to do harm than good.
History never repeats itself – but historical situations recur.” As.
He might himself be putting on a superb act, following the performance by logic alone and with his own strange emotions completely untouched, as an anthropologist might take part in some primitive rite. The fact that he uttered the appropriate sounds, and made the expected responses, really proved nothing at all.
Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.
Minkowski spacetime.
The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.
Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five space-suited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world.