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"I think engineering will supply our demand for a "spiritual" life after meat death."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Timeslip | ||
| When humans keep time on Mars, they must work with the extra forty minutes in each day. |
| Here they were on Mars, where the seasons were twice as long as Earth’s, and every day was forty minutes longer: why couldn’t people relax? Nadia had a sense that there was time for things even though she was always busy, and the extra thirty-nine-and-a-half minutes per day was probably the most important component of this feeling; human circadian biorhythms had been set over millions of years of evolution, and now suddenly to have extra minutes of day and night, day after day, night after night— no doubt it had effects. Nadia was sure of it, because despite the hectic pace of every day’s work, and the way she passed out in sheer exhaustion every night, she always woke rested. That strange pause on the digital clocks, when at midnight the figures hit 12:00:00 and suddenly stopped, and the unmarked time passed, passed, passed, sometimes it seemed for a very long time indeed; and then snapped on to 12:00:01, and began its usual inexorable flicker— well, the Martian timeslip was something special. Often Nadia was asleep through it, as were most of the rest of them. But Hiroko had a chant that she chanted during it when she was up, and she and the farm team, and many of the rest of them, spent every Saturday night partying and chanting that chant through the timeslip— something in Japanese, Nadia never learned what, though she sometimes hummed along, sitting enjoying the vault and her friends. |
| Technovelgy from Red Mars,
by Kim Stanley Robinson. Published by Random House in 1992 Additional resources -
|
I assume that Robinson borrowed this word from Philip K. Dick, who wrote Martian Time-Slip in 1964.
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'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
'The vast spinning sphere of Factory in the Sky loomed above and ahead of us, gleaming white against the unfathomable jet depths of surrounding space.'
'And if it doesn’t work,' inquired Lazarus, 'what does that make us? Sunspots?'
'The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case.'
'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
