Word: fluxes
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...placed in large, saucer-shaped pits. When winter rain flooded the pits, the lighter malachite swirled to the surface and could be more readily separated from the other rock. Half a mile away there were 13 furnaces, where the Bronze Age metallurgists smelted the ore, using iron as a flux (a substance that combines with impurities, forming a molten mix that can be easily removed). Bronze Age miners were able to produce 22-lb. copper ingots that were 97% to 98% pure, a degree of purity not exceeded until modern times...
...LABOR-MANAGEMENT time bomb is ticking in anticipation of the November 12 expiration of the current United Mine Workers contract. The confrontation promises to burst into a protracted strike with potentially crippling effects on the American economy. The strike will climax the present period of flux in the relationship of the coal industry to the national economy. This changing relationship has been caused by rapidly rising oil prices, which have given coal new importance as an abundant source of energy. The increased importance of coal has given the U.M.W. new leverage in contract negotiations, and the Union hopes to close...
...after a while, after enough stops along the way, the endpoints of past and future, of Detroit and New Orleans and Seattle and Baltimore, fade away, and the unfolding of the road itself becomes the important event. And so, perhaps it is only while traveling, in a state of flux and transition, that the American finds his identity, a fleeting identity which is all present and which dissolves as soon as it is constructed. We reach our destination and the present begins to recede into a new past...
Aldiss's hero is Texan Joe Bodenland, who, in a variation on H.G. Wells' Time Machine, adventurously drives his car smack into the flux and arrives in 1816 at the edge of Lake Geneva. Joe stumbles upon a villa containing Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley, who is writing Frankenstein. His subsequent relationship with Mary is dominated by the presence of Dr. Frankenstein and friends, who are quite as "real" as Mary, their creator. Joe comes to see Frankenstein's pursuit of pure scientific truth without social responsibility as the root of modern technological society, where "the head...
...blown ourselves all the way back to the time of the Troubles, the period from 1912 to 1920. We're in a state of total flux. The sorcerer's apprentice started the water flowing, and now we are all going to be swept along with it." Hyperbolic as it sounded, that statement by one leading Ulster Protestant was a grimly accurate assessment of Northern Ireland's current situation. With the collapse of the moderate Protestant-Catholic coalition and the imposition once again of direct rule from London, the future of the province was bleaker than...