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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Earth Normal | ||
| Using the earth standard. |
Although this is not the usual sf meaning, it is the first use of this phrase that I know about.
| As he waited, he noticed a curious little dial, in a lower corner of the instrument board, which he had not seen at first. One end of its graduated scale was marked, "Earth Normal," the other, "Pygmy Planet Normal." A tiny black needle was creeping slowly across the scale, toward "Pygmy Planet Normal." "That's how we tell what size we are, without having to look at a bottle," he muttered. |
| Technovelgy from The Pygmy Planet,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1932 Additional resources -
|
A more typical use can be seen in Derelict, a 1935 story by Raymond Z. Gallun published in Astounding Science Fiction.
He climbed through the airlock, and for a minute stood quietly, viewing his surroundings. Somewhere gravity plates continued to function in this ancient wreck, for he had weight here— perhaps one third Earth-normal. Junk was everywhere in the cavernous interior, distorted and crumpled grotesquely.
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
