Last Day, Last Words

The first post of this blog listed some first sentences from science fiction books ... now here are some last ones:


"Sure I know. A boy loves his dog."

He loved Big Brother.

For you.

"Absolutely, a day to remember."

Would I lie to you?

"Perhaps it is at that."

They can hurt.

but let's not shun the sun

Image credit: NASA

The sun arrives each morning as predictably as it left the previous night ... and then there are coronal mass ejections.

Found in science fiction works, words having to do with one star or another:

"Things were difficult for him in a world with two suns. The new sun was tiny and white, while the old one was big and yellow. The new sun circled constantly overhead. It never set, and he could no longer catch things at night."

"The surface of the Sun, barely ten thousand miles below the clear-walled cabin of the Lightrider, was a floor across the Universe. The photosphere was a landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere—the thousand-mile-thick outer atmosphere—a thin haze above it all."

"But the sun doesn't stop at the photosphere; the density of matter falls off slowly with height. If one included the ions and electrons that forever stream out into space in the solar wind—to cause auroras on Earth and to shape the plasma tails of comets—one might say that there was no real boundary to the Sun. It truly reaches out to touch the other stars."

"And the solar storm was blowing gouts of plasma, flooding some of their links with static. The sun was going through rough weather, spewing out big, noisy torrents."

But is the sun always bright and cheerful? Or it sometimes blue?

A few words about the moon ...

Do you like the moon? These guys (turn your volume down LOW!) do.

So many words have been written about one moon or another. How many of these have you read?

"What, exactly, would happen to the Moon without the Earth?"

"What is the first thing we do when awe-inspiring vistas of some faraway moon are transmitted back by our little robot envoys? Why, we reverently name the craters, valleys, and other strange beasts discovered out there."

"Today, with space full of ships, colonies on the inner planets, and Earth's Moon so close that pilots on the Luna run sleep home nights, it is hard to imagine when 'flying to the Moon' was a figure of speech for the impossible, when men who thought it could be done were visionaries, crackpots."

"The moon was very bright tonight."

"The first of December had arrived! the fatal day! for, if the projectile were not discharged that very night at 10h. 48m. 40s. P.M., more than eighteen years must roll by before the moon would again present herself under the same conditions of zenith and perigee."

"Due to the way the ship was positioned above the planet they were supposed to be surveying and evaluating, they had visible moons on almost every side; three completely full ones above them, in relation to the ship’s rotation."

And how well do you know your moons?

fear and dread

Son of Poseidon

child of Gaia (courtesy NASA/JPL)

a priestess of Hera

Second

(Venus - the second planet)
Image credit: Magellan Project,  NASA

A measure of time. The place after first. Something following. A small part, as of a minute ("just a second"). A repeating, as in a second chance. An alternate, as in every second year. Something inferior in rank ... a second vice president, a second chair in an orchestra. A standby in a duel. A gear in a car’s transmission. A reference to something or someone past … a second Pearl Harbor, a second Churchill. And the time needed for a cesium-133 atom to perform 9,192,631,770 complete oscillations.

An adding on. Like this entry.

Some "second" books:

The Children of the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
Sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep

Count Zero, by William Gibson
Sequel to Neuromancer

Cerberus, by Jack L. Chalker
Book II of the Lords of the Diamond series

Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
Sequel to Ender’s Game

The Garden of the Stone, by Victoria Strauss
Sequel to The Arm of the Stone

The Gripping Hand, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye

Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross
Sequel to Singularity Sky

Queen of Candesce, by Karl Schroeder
Book Two of Virga

The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
Book two of the Culture series

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, by Frederik Pohl
Second book in the Heechee series

What second books would you like to read?