Word: sirius
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Similar complaints are voiced by others in the booming new software business. Says Jerry Jewell, president of Sacramento's Sirius Software, which makes computer games: "We have to introduce three or four new products per month just to stay ahead of the pirates...
...fraud." What irritates professional stargazers is that the self-styled registry, which began in 1979 and "sold" more than 30,000 stars last year, is invading turf that has long been their special preserve. By astronomical tradition, only a few dozen of the brightest stars, such as Sirius, Vega, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran, are called by proper names, many of which derive from early Arab astronomy. The remainder are listed in various catalogues, drily and unromantically, by initials and numbers that tell astronomers such no-nonsense things as their position, type and magnitude (brightness...
...Argos: Archives. That running title is matched by the pace of Lessing's production: three good-sized novels in the past 16 months. Shikasta (1979) tells of a primitive, beautiful planet called Rohanda, which is being jointly colonized by the two vast galactic empires of Canopus and Sirius. A misalignment of cosmic forces throws Rohanda awry; its developing inhabitants stop listening to their wise tutors and begin behaving suspiciously like members of the human race. The Canopean overseers sadly change the place's name to Shikasta, "the hurt, the damaged, the wounded one." In The Marriages Between Zones...
...Sirian Experiments, unfortunately, recapitulates as much as it adds. The primary subject is once again the catastrophe that overtakes Shikasta (earth). The observer this time is a woman named Ambien II, a virtually immortal emissary from Sirius. She was in on the original cultivation of Rohanda-Shikasta. She retains a proprietary interest in the ailing planet, and visits it every eon or so. In addition to the unfolding spectacle of human savagery, she sees some spectacular sights. She happens to be flying over in a small bubble of a spaceship when the planet suddenly tips over from its upright axis...
While keeping tabs on Rohanda, Ambien II begins to believe that Canopus is far more advanced than Sirius. The Sirians are technological wizards, but every millennium or so they discover that their ever more sophisticated machines have rendered more people useless and unhappy. Ambien suspects that the Canopeans have achieved a wisdom that transcends this problem, and she initiates a friendship with Klorathy, a senior Canopean administrator, in the hope of prying his secrets away. The job is not easy. He has the habit of answering a question with another question. He is also given to interstellar bromides: "Everything...