"Love Me, Love My—"
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| (Image from FREEP!K) |
First appearance: Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1958.
Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).
Short story (14 pages).
Online at SFFAudio (HERE).
"I WILL NOT GIVE UP MY POT!"
"Did you know that this ship has twenty million dollars worth of large unset diamonds and sixty millions in galactic currency on board?" Do tell. So, what does that have to do with Lin's plan to smuggle a vegy on board the Astra on her Venus-to-tau Ceti III run? If you're thinking "nothing," then you don't know too much about people . . .
Principal characters:
~ Sims ("I can't understand why you even hesitate"), Lin Braquet ("Every time I try to kiss you a big yellow eye on the end of a stalk gets in the way"), the girl in the travel agency ("In fact the star lines discourage vegy travel"), Leah ("You're selfish, stupid, impossible, a beast, cruel . . ."), Winnie ("You couldn't pollinate a geranium"), Antone Brush ("Sit down!"), Gregor Samsen ("Finally he took cautious steps to the opening and went in, moving very slowly"), and the doctor ("You have nothing to worry about any more").
References and resources:
- "tau Ceti III":
"Tau Ceti, Latinized from τ Ceti, is a single star in the constellation Cetus that is spectrally similar to the Sun, although it has only about 78% of the Sun's mass. At a distance of just under 12 light-years (3.7 parsecs) from the Solar System, it is a relatively nearby star and the closest solitary G-class star. The star appears stable, with little stellar variation, and is metal-deficient (low in elements other than hydrogen and helium) relative to the Sun. . . . Since December 2012, there has been evidence of at least four planets—all likely super-Earths—orbiting Tau Ceti, and two of these are potentially in the habitable zone." (Wikipedia HERE).
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- "I like it here on Venus":
He might be the only one. In the 1950s nobody had a clue as to what the surface conditions of Venus might be, so our author went along with Bradbury:
"The planet Venus has been used as a setting in fiction since before the 19th century. Its opaque cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface—a 'cosmic Rorschach test,' in the words of science fiction author Stephen L. Gillett. The planet was often depicted as warmer than Earth but still habitable by humans. Depictions of Venus as a lush, verdant paradise, an oceanic planet, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like beasts or other monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s. Some other stories portrayed it as a desert, or invented more exotic settings. The absence of a common vision resulted in Venus not developing a coherent fictional mythology, in contrast to the image of Mars in fiction.
". . . [Ray] Bradbury's short story 'The Long Rain' (1950) depicts Venus as a planet with incessant rain, and was later adapted to screen twice: to film in The Illustrated Man (1969) and to television in The Ray Bradbury Theater (1992)—though the latter removed all references to Venus in light of the changed scientific views on the planet's conditions. Bradbury revisited the rainy vision of Venus in 'All Summer in a Day' (1954), where the Sun is only visible through the cloud cover once every seven years." (Wikipedia HERE.)
- "the Polaris System":
Just about everybody knows that Polaris is the Pole Star, but no one is sure how far away it is:
"Polaris is a star in the northern circumpolar constellation of Ursa Minor. It is designated α Ursae Minoris (Latinized to Alpha Ursae Minoris) and is commonly called the North Star or Pole Star. With an apparent magnitude that fluctuates around 1.98, it is the brightest star in the constellation and is readily visible to the naked eye at night. The position of the star lies less than 1° away from the north celestial pole, making it the current northern pole star. The stable position of the star in the Northern Sky makes it useful for navigation.
"As the closest Cepheid variable its distance is used as part of the cosmic distance ladder. The revised Hipparcos stellar parallax gives a distance to Polaris of about 433 light-years (133 parsecs), while the successor mission Gaia gives a distance of about 448 light-years (137 parsecs). Calculations by other methods vary widely." (Wikipedia HERE).
- Here are the stories that we've featured which were unambiguously penned by Rog Phillips:
"From This Dark Mind" (HERE), "You'll Die Yesterday" (HERE), "The Man from Mars" and the non-SFF "A Case of Homicide" (HERE), and "Repeat Performance" (HERE).
Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.
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