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"A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content."
- Theodore Sturgeon
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| Environmental Happening | ||
| Weather created as a work of art. |
In Varley's future moon, there are many disneylands - enormous caverns carved from the rock and sealed, duplicating environments once found on Earth. They are so large that even the weather becomes a work of art created by man.
| An Environmental happening has no opening chords like a musical symphony. It is already in progress when you arrive and will still be going on when you leave. The weather in disneyland is a continuous process and we merely shape a few hours of it to our wills...
You experience the symphony with all five senses and several that you are not aware of. Most people do not realize the effect of a gigantic low-pressure area sweeping over them, but they feel it all the same... Cyclone has a definite beginning, however. At least to the audience. It begins with the opening bolt of lightning. I worked on it a long time, and designed it to shatter nerves. There is the slow building of thunderheads ... then it hits. It crashes in at seventeen points in a ring around the audience, none further away than a half a kilometer. It is poperly called chain lightning, because after the initial discharge it keeps flashing for a full seven seconds. It's designed to take the hair right off your scalp... ...Weather is an experiential thing, and that's why tapes and films of my work sell few copies. You have to be there and have the wind actually whipping your face and feel the oppressive weight of a tornado as it passes overhead like a vermiform freight train... |
| Technovelgy from The Phantom of Kansas,
by John Varley. Published by Unknown in 1976 Additional resources -
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- Weather As Art
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| A Remarkable Coincidence |
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'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
