Word: earthness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...making a lunar landing, space experts say, the Soviets will probably want to test two techniques that they have not yet attempted: 1) manned rendezvous and docking in space, and 2) an unmanned soft landing on the moon. Unmanned Russian spacecraft have twice rendezvoused and docked auto matically in earth orbit, but the technique would be far more difficult near the moon, 240,000 miles away from terrestrial control stations. And the Russians have yet to demonstrate a soft-landing system as reliable as the one that lowered five U.S. Surveyor spacecraft gently to the lunar surface...
Irony comes with the first rays of morning: the tale will never be told, either by the dumb-struck youth or by the dead millionaire. Chilly splinters of the Dinesen style occasionally gleam in the stilted drama. But recurrent lines, like "The earth trembled at the loss of my innocence," are difficult enough on paper; on film they are impossible...
Many things can happen in John Earth's funhouse, but getting lost is not likely to be one of them. Whenever the rubber spiders and indiscreetly aimed jets of air become too threatening, the lights suddenly flash on and Proprietor Barth himself ambles in and starts explaining about the machinery. Those who take their funhouses seriously may grow confused and exasperated. But readers of The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy are familiar with Barth's impulses toward farce, his intellectual mobility, shaggy doggerel and merry nihilism. These people are apt to accept the clever gimmickry...
...developed beyond the wildest dreams of 20th century man. Rather, it has developed precisely as a good many current dreams predict: a detritosphere, made up of atomized waste products and the debris of innumerable satellite disasters, smothers the globe. The sun has been stifled, the sea polluted. The earth itself is encrusted with a layer of rubble. The human race has retreated into sealed, windowless cells serviced by tube and tap. All outside contact is hygienically transmitted over an infinitely sophisticated kind of television, which provides everything at the press of a button-from sex to seaside holidays, from...
...security. Creating a kind of Alice in Wonderland in reverse, he shows a powerful and peculiar imagination. Like Alice, Uncumber leaves her safe, dull, comfortable home. But where Alice retreats down a tunnel from a world of horsehair sofas and bullying grownups, Uncumber escapes onto the surface of the earth itself. Like Alice, she is both alarmed and enraptured by what she finds. Her first stunted blade of grass delights her. She sits entranced for hours, watching oily, scum-covered waves lapping at a blackened shore. The whole world-a hideous desert of slag heaps, ashpits, garbage, swamping flies...