Monday 24 October 2016

One Immense Convulsion

The day side of Satan is "...one immense convulsion..." (David Falkayn: Star Trader, p. 511):

stormclouds;
explosions of lightning;
wild winds;
volcanoes;
avalanches;
floods;
waves like mountains torn to shreds;
air almost solid with rain, hail and stones;
boiled-off vapors turbulently, massively recondensing;
a storm that drives half an ocean across a continent;
winds of two or three hundred kph forming a hurricane as a back eddy or dead zone.

The hurricane catches Gahood's nineteen destroyers:

"...as a November gale catches dead leaves in the northlands of Earth." (p. 513)

The destroyers are variously:

bounced around and cast aside;
peeled open;
broken apart by solid chunks;
drowned in spume-filled air;
tossed against mountains.

Their pieces are strewn, buried, reduced to dust and atoms or locked into new rock strata and never found. The revenge of nature against technology?

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I think I will reread SATAN'S WORLD after I'm done with Stirling's ON THE OCEANS OF ETERNITY. The Anderson books seems to be PERFECT science fiction: dealing with scientifically plausible phenomena, other worlds, other races, adventure, issues of life and death, serious ideas about society and politics, etc.

Sean