Tuesday 19 September 2017

Another Realization And More Gravanol

Poul Anderson, "Brake" IN Anderson, Cold Victory (New York, 1982), pp. 225-283.

Captain Banning swears "'Per Jovem,'" (p. 263), then stiffens, then repeats, in English, "'By Jupiter... Well, by Jupiter!'" (ibid.)

The stiffening is a definite warning that here is yet another Anderson moment of realization. Sure enough, sufficiently lightened, Banning's large and spherical but damaged spaceship will be able to float in the Jovian atmosphere until rescue ships arrive.

In Jovian gravity:

"...gravanol injections would prevent physiological damage." (p. 281)

Thus, gravanol exists in the first two of Anderson's future histories.

Banning's crew consults a radaltimeter. (p. 282) Their floating spaceship is compared to "...an old drop in a densitometer..." (. 283) Bloggers would be lost without Wikipedia.

4 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Wikipedia? And I would include an old fashioned hard copy dictionary as well. One of the better ones!

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Old fashioned but up to date.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I agree, such as the OXFORD DICTIONARY. And I've sometimes used the old but useful RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

When I was young some very old-fashioned Englishmen still swore "By Jove!". Though that was of course a Classical borrowing, originally used so that you'd avoid blaspheming the Christian deity (particularly in front of ladies and clergymen.)