Word: voided
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...reaching a flashing terminal velocity of about 450 m.p.h. As he plummeted, he took readings on his instruments, and with cool self-possession, tape-recorded his "subjective reactions and observations of this interesting experiment." On he dropped, like a stone into a void-until at an altitude of 12,000 ft., 2 min. 58 sec. and twelve miles after he had bailed out, a barometric device on his pack blew open his parachute, and he sailed slowly and safely to the ground...
...Algeria. The F.L.N. rebels, insisting that the French Sahara is an inseparable part of Algeria (although most Algerian Moslems fear the Sahara and have traditionally avoided it), swore to destroy any oil the French tried to move out of the desert, proclaimed that the rebel government would automatically consider void any Sahara concessions that foreign oil companies negotiated with the French government...
...later, "centered upon the City of London itself. It was an incendiary classic. Nearly 1,500 fires had to be fought. Eight Wren churches were destroyed or damaged. The Guildhall was smitten by fire and blast, and St. Paul's Cathedral was only saved by heroic exertions. A void of ruin at the very center of the British world gapes upon us to this day." But for all its grim destruction, the "incendiary classic" may yet have some compensations...
Based on a "space cycle" by Swedish Poet Harry Martinson, Aniara proved to be a lengthy allegory about man's journey through life "in the spiritual void" that sucks him at last to his own destruction. The curtain rises on the interior of a spaceship dominated by the towering electronic brain, a mechanism so advanced that it is nearly human. Ranged in front of it as ghostlike silhouettes, the passengers chant a lament for the planet Doris (actually the Earth) they just left behind...
...book uses reality merely as a springboard toward fantasy; characters may suddenly levitate or turn into werewolves. Also, there are boggy tracts that sound, and no doubt are meant to sound, like ads for Rosicrucianism ("large increments of love are released that are fermenting in the Fertile Void"). What emerges is an allegory on whatever the reader chooses-the perversity of man, the bright illusion of love, the red-eyed aurochs of war. Dotted throughout the book are moon-mad digressions-a plan to enroll farm boys in the Joy Scouts of America, hike them into Harlem for instruction...