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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
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| 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 Spider 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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'The pitiless M rays pierced Earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass...'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Nanny is different,' Tom Fields murmured... 'she's not like a machine. She's like a person.'
'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'The clothes and jewelery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements.'
'At the end of each appendage's eight fingers there are tinier appendages...'
'We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,' said lead researcher Katsu Takahashi.
