Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Long before the invention of the rocket, man dreamed of hoisting sail and traveling through space in wind-blown ships. In The True History, a tale written in the 2nd century A.D. by the satirist and onetime lawyer, Lucian of Samosata, a ship with a 50-man crew is caught in an Atlantic storm, carried aloft and sent, sail billowing, on a journey to the moon. Later storytellers launched ships with sails on even more fanciful space trips. But none of these fictional voyages was as remarkable as the mission now being planned for NASA by scientists at Pasadena...
...Manhattan. Lem is an Eastern European but his mind wanders in an American technological wilderness, and the paranoia he evokes is at home under the shadow of the Science Center. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub starts where a comfortable narrative would already be well into the body of its tale. The narrator is in some indefinite Pentagon Three, buried deep within the Rocky Mountains. Pentagon Three, with thousands of offices, miles of corridors, and an enormous supply of food and water, sealed itself off from the outside world when it felt America became heretical--when American joined a world federation...
...prevailing sense of horror is perhaps best described by the apocryphal tale of a freezer in Amin's house that contains the heads of his most distinguished victims, including the former Chief Justice; from time to time, the story goes, Amin walks over to the freezer to lecture his frozen audience about the evils of their ways. A former Amin aide who escaped to Kenya last year described Ugandan life to TIME Correspondent William McWhirter last week: "You are walking, and any creature making a step on the dry grass behind you might be an Amin man. Whenever...
...libertarians in the U.S.S.R. and other Communist countries were taking Helsinki seriously-or acting as if they were. According to a tale that has been repeated with local variations in virtually every Communist country in Europe, a grandmother goes to the police station in Pinsk and requests permission to visit her sister in The Bronx. The policeman just shakes his head. The old lady then pulls out of her string shopping bag the tattered pages from Pravda reproducing the text of the Helsinki agreement. "It says here, young man, on page 3, section A-Contacts and Regular Meetings...
...heard five hours later, and walks out to find his car gone. It has been towed. Sweeney goes to the city pound to pick it up, but it's a rented car and the registration is back home in Cleveland. Sorry, Pat: no registration, no automobile. Another harrowing fairy tale of The Big Apple to freak out folks in the countryside...