Mac Moyer (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} macmoyer) wrote,@ 2008-06-02 11:28:00 |
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SCIENTIFICTION!
I'm reading The Skylark of Space, and for some reason this passage struck me as especially iconic:
For forty-eight hours the uncontrolled atomic motor dragged the masterless vessel with its four unconscious passengers through the illimitable reaches of empty space, with an awful and constantly increasing velocity.
I don't know why that passage strikes me as so representative of pre-Golden-Age science fiction. The elaborately stumbling rhythm? The lengthy description without a drop of imagery? The awkward pairing of the emotional adjective "awful" with the factual "velocity," in a sentence already weighed down with numbers? Above all, I can't figure out how you would build a sentence like that without a word processor. It's like the Stonehenge of sentences.
