"He and I went onto the porch for cocktails while Lute programmed the food mechs. Space dropped dizzily from the viewport, thin starred black here on the rim. Huge and shapeless - we being more or less within it - the galaxy streamed past and was lost to sight; we looked toward remoteness."
-Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966), I, p. 12.
"The tables were arranged around a sunken transparency, ten meters across, which gave on the surface of Tiamat and thus the sky beyond. Nonreflecting, in the dim interior light it seemed indeed a well of night which the stars crowded, slowly streaming. The table Dorcas reached was on the bottom tier, with a view directly down into infinity. A glowlamp on it cast softness over cloth, silver, ceramic, and the two people already seated."
-"Iron," 3, p. 36.
Tiamat is a cylindrical asteroid with excavated rooms and passages, spinning to generate centrifugal force. Anyone on the surface would be flung off.
Two meals. Two fictional futures. Two imaginative works by Poul Anderson. (This post does not join our Food Thread because we are not told what the characters eat.)
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
If Nicholas van Rijn had been the host or a guest at these meals, I think we would have gotten a detailed description of the menu! Or Stirling might well have given us one.
Ad astra! Sean
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