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Old Hundredth (short Story)
"Old Hundredth" is a science fiction short story by British writer Brian Aldiss. It was first published in ''Airs of the Earth'' in 1963 and has been anthologised many times. It was included in '' The Golden Age of Science Fiction''. Plot In the far distant future, the Moon has left Earth; Earth and Venus orbit each other. Humans have left Earth, but the planet is inhabited by a mixture of animals and Impures; intelligent creatures created by human experimenters on Venus. Dandi, a giant sloth-like creature, wanders the planet. She is the ward of, and mentally linked to, her Mentor, a giant and ancient dolphin that lives in an underwater cell. Dandi is an expert in the musicolumns, insubstantial remains of the psyches of people that react musically when intelligent life is near. Dandi returns to her home, the crumbling remains of a human settlement, where she encounters a bear, one of few creatures than retain human-like aggressive behaviour. Her Mentor wishes her to kill the ...
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Brian Aldiss
Brian Wilson Aldiss (; 18 August 1925 – 19 August 2017) was an English writer, artist, and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss was a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society. He was (with Harry Harrison) co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. Aldiss was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2000 and inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004. He received two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and one John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He wrote the short story " Supertoys Last All Summer Long" (1969), the basis for the Stanley Kubrick–developed Steven Spielberg film '' A.I. Artificial Intelligence'' (2001). Aldiss was associated with the British New Wave of science fiction. Life and ca ...
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The Golden Age Of Science Fiction (anthology)
''The Golden Age of Science Fiction'' is an anthology of science fiction short stories all originally published between 1949 and 1962. The stories were selected and introduced by Kingsley Amis, who also wrote an Editor's Note and a 21-page Introduction. The collection was first published by Hutchinson in 1981 and was released in paperback by Penguin in 1983. Contents The book includes the following stories: * "The Quest for Saint Aquin", by Anthony Boucher * "The Xi Effect", by Philip Latham *" The Tunnel under the World", by Frederik Pohl * "Old Hundredth", by Brian Aldiss * "A Work of Art", by James Blish * "Harrison Bergeron", by Kurt Vonnegut * " The Voices of Time", by J. G. Ballard * "Specialist", by Robert Sheckley *"He Walked Around the Horses", by H. Beam Piper * "The Game of Rat and Dragon", by Cordwainer Smith * "The Nine Billion Names of God", by Arthur C. Clarke * "The Streets of Ashkelon", by Harry Harrison * " The Country of the Kind", by Damon Knight * " The Mac ...
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Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is sometimes called Earth's "sister" or "twin" planet as it is almost as large and has a similar composition. As an interior planet to Earth, Venus (like Mercury) appears in Earth's sky never far from the Sun, either as morning star or evening star. Aside from the Sun and Moon, Venus is the brightest natural object in Earth's sky, capable of casting visible shadows on Earth at dark conditions and being visible to the naked eye in broad daylight. Venus is the second largest terrestrial object of the Solar System. It has a surface gravity slightly lower than on Earth and has a very weak induced magnetosphere. The atmosphere of Venus, mainly consists of carbon dioxide, and is the densest and hottest of the four terrestrial planets at the surface. With an atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface of about 92 times the sea level pressure of Earth and a mean temperature of , the carbon dioxide gas at Venus's surface is in t ...
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Sloth
Sloths are a group of Neotropical xenarthran mammals constituting the suborder Folivora, including the extant arboreal tree sloths and extinct terrestrial ground sloths. Noted for their slowness of movement, tree sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down in the trees of the tropical rainforests of South America and Central America. Sloths are considered to be most closely related to anteaters, together making up the xenarthran order Pilosa. There are six extant sloth species in two genera – '' Bradypus'' (three–toed sloths) and '' Choloepus'' (two–toed sloths). Despite this traditional naming, all sloths have three toes on each rear limb-- although two-toed sloths have only two digits on each forelimb. The two groups of sloths are from different, distantly related families, and are thought to have evolved their morphology via parallel evolution from terrestrial ancestors. Besides the extant species, many species of ground sloths ranging up to the size of ele ...
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Dolphin
A dolphin is an aquatic mammal within the infraorder Cetacea. Dolphin species belong to the families Delphinidae (the oceanic dolphins), Platanistidae (the Indian river dolphins), Iniidae (the New World river dolphins), Pontoporiidae (the brackish dolphins), and the extinct Lipotidae (baiji or Chinese river dolphin). There are 40 extant species named as dolphins. Dolphins range in size from the and Maui's dolphin to the and orca. Various species of dolphins exhibit sexual dimorphism where the males are larger than females. They have streamlined bodies and two limbs that are modified into flippers. Though not quite as flexible as seals, some dolphins can briefly travel at speeds of per hour or leap about . Dolphins use their conical teeth to capture fast-moving prey. They have well-developed hearing which is adapted for both air and water. It is so well developed that some can survive even if they are blind. Some species are well adapted for diving to great de ...
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Old 100th
"Old 100th" or "Old Hundredth" (also known as "Old Hundred") is a hymn tune in long metre, from the second edition of the Genevan Psalter. It is one of the best known melodies in many occidental Christian musical traditions. The tune is usually attributed to the French composer Louis Bourgeois (c.1560). Although the tune was first associated with Psalm 134 in the Genevan Psalter, the melody receives its current name from an association with the ''100th'' Psalm, in a translation by William Kethe entitled "All People that on Earth do Dwell". The melody is also sung to various other lyrics, including the Common Doxology and various German Lutheran chorales. In that latter respect it was used by Johann Sebastian Bach as a cantus firmus in his chorale cantata ''Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir'' (BWV 130). Background The Genevan Psalter was compiled over a number of years in the Swiss city of Geneva, a center of Protestant activity during the Reformation, in response to the teachi ...
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Science Fiction Short Stories
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek m ...
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1963 Short Stories
Events January * January 1 – Bogle–Chandler case: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation scientist Dr. Gilbert Bogle and Mrs. Margaret Chandler are found dead (presumed poisoned), in bushland near the Lane Cove River, Sydney, Australia. * January 2 – Vietnam War – Battle of Ap Bac: The Viet Cong win their first major victory. * January 9 – A January 1963 lunar eclipse, total penumbral lunar eclipse is visible in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and is the 56th lunar eclipse of Lunar Saros 114. Gamma has a value of −1.01282. It occurs on the night between Wednesday, January 9 and Thursday, January 10, 1963. * January 13 – 1963 Togolese coup d'état: A military coup in Togo results in the installation of coup leader Emmanuel Bodjollé as president. * January 17 – A last quarter moon occurs between the January 1963 lunar eclipse, penumbral lunar eclipse and the Solar eclipse of January 25, 1963, annular solar ...
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