Getting A Hern IA

Stick With Me, Kid, This One's A Doozy

Apropos not very much, Your Humble Scribe was busy helping people on the phone this afternoon when my wandering gaze fell upon a particular volume in the bookcase, one of the read works that no longer comprise my Book Mountain.

     'Aha!' thought Conrad to himself.  'So, there it is, right in front of me.'  Art!

     This is a meeting in space between a warship from Utopia and the Okie city of New York - don't tell me you didn't recognise the Empire State Tower?  I have mentioned James Blish's epic quadrology recently, whilst on the subject of flying cities.  NYNY falls into a hazardous encounter between the warring planets of Utopia and Gort, trying to make an honest - well, semi-honest - buck by doing work for them.  Then the Earth police show up, and when JB says 'police' what he means is 'an intergalactic military task force'.  So you have Gort, Utopia, NYNY and the Earth police, all at odds with each other.  Art!

     The 'spindizzy' fields here are a bit of artistic licence as they are invisiblewhen in operation.  This illustration is a fair exemplar of what the spindizzy was able to do: lift any object in what was both anti-gravity and faster-than-light-drive combined.

     JB, using pages of cod physics equations, maintained that the spindizzy got more efficient the larger the mass it operated upon, which is why whole cities from the bucolic backwater of Earth went 'Okie', looking for work amongst the human civilisations that had scattered across the Galaxy over a period of centuries.

     Near the conclusion of "Earthman, Come Home" the Okies of NYNY use as many spindizzies as they can semi-honestly lay their hands upon to 'fly' the planet Hern VI - which is where today's title comes from - in order to whiz across the Galaxy and thwart a lethal threat from the survivors of the Vegan Tyranny, which had been a power in the cosmos before Hom. Sap. arrived on the scene.  Art!

Intriguing if a little too unconventional

     Of course it's too minor a plot point to earn a novel cover, so instead here's a picture of NYNY's Okies discovering the sinister fiefdom of the Interstellar Master Traders.  Art!

     A tad confusing, since this event takes place at the end of the novel, yet this page sports the opening paragraphs.  Time travel, gotta be.

     ANYWAY there is a passage where Hern VI scares the living daylight out of inhabited systems as rockets toward Earth, where JB lays out a sequence of alarmed challenges from planetary systems it passes by or through: Wolf 359, Kruger 60, Sirius, RD-4º4048, 40 Eridani.  To the Okies these are names straight out of the legendary past, " - like being hailed by ancient Greece or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts".  Art!

     One day - possibly when I take over - a film studio with an unlimited budget will do ECH as a film.

     ANYWAY I was struck by the mention of ancient Greece, because there are literary descriptions of floating islands in the annals of Hellenic prose.  Yes yes yes, these float, they don't fly.  Explain to me just how familiar the Greeks of 800 BC were with powered mechanical flight?  Art!

     This is Aeolia, an island floating on the winds, thanks to being ruled by Aeolus, the god of wind.  Could probably do with a dose of Alka-Seltzer.  Odysseus and his crew docked here for a bit of a breather after escaping from the ogre Cyclops.

     Then, of course, we have Arthur C. Clarke, who throws a real metaphorical wrench in the delicately-constructed gears of this Intro, with - Art!

     I think it's time to move on.

"When 'D.I.Y.' Means 'Dead Injured or Yelling'

Conrad clutched himself with glee at finding a particularly mendacious web-page that listed the 12 most dangerous power tools you might find in the average citizen's household (no flamethrowers here, I'm afraid).

     Unsurprisingly, in at Number 1 was the - 

CHAINSAW:  These things can suffer from 'kickback', which is when the end of the cutting saw blade hits an object, causing it to lift up violently and rapidly towards the user.  A chainsaw will make short work of a tree-trunk; just imagine how effortlessly it will carve Hom. Sap. into dog food.  Art!

     Nope, not going to illustrate with gory details from teh Interwebz.  Still SFW.

That Sounds Like A Disease

Well, if "The Daily Beast" is going to con me into a re-subscription, Conrad is going to wring content out of it until it's a hollow husk, and then chop up the husk and use it to fertilise the flowers.  Art!

     I told you it sounds like a disease, probably to do with skunk glands and mitochondria.  AND yet more proof that TDB is still obsessed with the British Monarchy ON SOUTH CANADIAN INDEPENDENCE DAY <sighs heavily>.

"City In The Sky"

The initial round of nuclear missile attacks in the Middle East have halted, leaving everyone to wonder what next?

‘Davy!’ exclaimed Dovid, looking enthused.  ‘What a brilliant idea!  Virg – Mizz Branson – we can play the honest broker here.’

     With a fitting sense of irony, it was Kouroush who understood what the Israeli meant first of all. 

      Israel’s massive retaliation against the Iranian generals brought many things in it’s wake.  Most deadly of all was the radioactive fallout from Natanz, which polluted a vast area downwind of the nuclear missile site.  The UN helped the evacuees, some of whom carried out an odyssey into neighbouring Pakistan – an event that was to create a deadly heritage less than one generation later.  Iranian rancour was surprisingly muted – in the disaster’s aftermath a form of creaking, naive democracy arrived: after all, the entire military junta had perished in fire and flame beneath the rocks of Damavand, leaving a vacuum that the ever-present Iranian political underground opposition filled.

     The Jordanian declaration of war and mobilisation fizzled out in prosaic matter-of-fact geography: to attack Iran en masse they needed to transit Iraq, which would have no truck with neighbours wanting to fight in close proximity.  Talk of war turned to talk of justice, which turned to talk of reparations, and when the bankers of both nations met, a sullen truce emerged.

     The unrepentant attitude of Israel (personified by an IDF television spokesman saying “They started it!”) also had echoes, both within and externally.  These went unseen and unheard for thirty years.  Nonetheless, they existed, and would come back to haunt survivors.

     I don't think there's much mileage in Israel coyly refusing to confirm or deny that it has a nuclear arsenal.

Conrad:  Still ANGRY!

I don't have the content-generating incompetence and ineptness of First Bus to fall back on anymore, so I shall just have to bring up the Codeword compilers and zap a few of them with the Remote Nuclear Detonator, the pikers.

ZING:  Are you Dog Buns kidding me?  "A high-pitched buzzing sound"; "Vitality, zest" according to my Collins Concise.  For the first, you'd just use 'BUZZ' and for the second, O, I dunno, why not use 'ZEST'.  Art!

Toothpaste.  I ask you.  Toothpaste.

OHMS:  This is something wilfully obscure and to do with electricity.  I think it's a unit of measurement named after a Teuton.  <checks>.  Ah yes, a unit of electrical resistance, named after George.  WHAT, ARE WE ALL SUDDENLY PHYSICISTS NOW? 

Art!

Close enough

APLOMB:  What I do not have thanks to those wretched compilers.  No, I'm not defining it, go look it up yourself.  I'm going to sit here and seethe with my bucket of gin for company.  Art!

A Plumb.  Close enough

Finally -

Conrad is unsure if the tracking algorithm has thrown up Youtube channels because of what I've seen recently, but Dogpiling Onto Indy 5 appears to have become a cottage industry.  There is enough venom abroad to finish off a herd of Diplodocii.  Or are they Brachiosaurae now?  If I were Harrison Ford or Phoebe Waller-Bridge I'd be inside with the curtains drawn and getting my groceries via Ocado.

     And with that we are done!