Orbital Novel Quotes

Wherever the future leads us, every atom of me is so glad to be in your orbit.

It occurs to her, eventually, that Doug and all the other humans talk about their lives with a myopic intensity, sharing singular, subjective opinions as if they are each the protagonist of their own novel. They take turns listening to each other without ever yielding their own certainty of their star status, and they treat their fellow humans as guest protagonists visiting from their own respective books. None of the humans are satellites the way she is, in her orbit around Doug.

like a moon you just want to be in the orbit of,

I've already got the storm figured out. Some idiot blew up the sun. Some dumb Russian general pushed the wrong button and launched one of their million missiles, or maybe NASA misaimed one of our test rockets. Either way, the sun is gone and we're now engaged in a nuclear shootout. It's the end of everything. Batman and Superman aren't coming and James Bond doesn't have a trick up his sleeve to save us this time. In a week or a month, we'll all freeze to death, just like in that Twilight Zone episode where the pretty lady is burning up with fever, dreaming the sun is baking the world dry, when really the Earth has dropped out of orbit, is hurtling further and further away from the sun, rapidly turning into a big ball of ice.

The human spirit, padded in ignorance, is a wondrous thing. They move within their own orbits- each of the seemingly lost, or intentionally lost in his or her own endeavors- while shifting into and out of one another's lives.

Looking back now on the period when I wrote the books, I feel like it was a good time in my life, because I had work I needed to do, and I did it. I was perennially broke, and lonely, and anxious about money, but I also had this other thing, this part of my life which was secret and protected, and my thoughts returned to it all the time, and my feelings orbited around it, and it belonged to me completely. In a way it was like a love affair, or an infatuation, except that it only involved myself and it was all within my own control. (The opposite of a love affair, then.) For all the frustration and difficulty of writing a novel, I knew from the beginning of the process that I had been given something very important, a special gift, a blessing. It was like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before. When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer.

They are totally in the dark, the whole lot of them. They only pretend to think about important stuff...Sure, they have to use their brains a little to get rich in the first place, but once they make it it's a piece of cake--they don't need to think anymore. Like an orbiting satellite doesn't need gas. They just keep going round and round, always over the same damn place.

You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.” Sherlock

Nikki could barely pull herself away from the spinning alien beauty in the window, but Elon Musk was on the big screen with a drink in his hand. “Congratulations, Starship, on entering Martian orbit,” he said, smiling and raising his flute of champagne from the now very distant Florida peninsula. “Cheers to the six of you and best wishes for a safe and stellar landing on Monday.” -- from the upcoming novel MARS COLONY AGATHA: NIKKI RED by Jack Chaucer, 1-1-20

She ran her hands, butterfly fashion, over the keys. "A little morsel of Stravinski?" she said. It was in the middle of the morsel that Adele came in and found Lucia playing Stravinski to Mr. Greatorex. The position seemed to be away, away beyond her orbit altogether, and she merely waited with undiminished faith in Lucia, to see what would happen when Lucia became aware to whom she was playing. . . . It was a longish morsel, too: more like a meal than a morsel, and it was also remarkably like a muddle. Finally, Lucia made an optimistic attempt at the double chromatic scale in divergent directions which brought it to an end, and laughed gaily. "My poor fingers," she said. "Delicious piano, dear Adele. I love a Bechstein; that was a little morsel of Stravinski. Hectic perhaps, do you think? But so true to the modern idea: little feverish excursions: little bits of tunes, and nothing worked out. But I always say that there is something in Stravinski, if you study him. How I worked at that little piece, and I'm afraid it's far from perfect yet.

When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn’t thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares.

Cosa diventò il ragazzo per lei, in quel periodo? Una smania sessuale che la teneva in uno stato di permanente fantasticheria erotica; un avvampare della testa che voleva essere all’altezza di quella di lui; soprattutto un astratto progetto di coppia segreta, chiusa dentro una specie di rifugio che doveva essere mezzo capanna per due cuori, mezzo laboratorio di idee sulla complessità del mondo, lui presente e attivo, lei un’ombra incollata alle sue calcagna, suggeritrice prudente, devota collaboratrice. Le rare volte che riuscivano a stare insieme non per pochi minuti ma per un’ora, quell’ora si trasformava in un flusso inesausto di scambi sessuali e verbali, un complessivo star bene che al momento della separazione rendeva insopportabile il ritorno alla salumeria e al letto di Stefano. «Non ne posso più». «Neanch’io». «Che si fa?». «Non lo so». «Voglio stare con te sempre». O almeno, aggiungeva lei, per qualche ora tutti i giorni. Ma come ritagliarsi un tempo costante, al sicuro? Vedere Nino a casa era pericolosissimo, vederlo per strada ancora più pericoloso. Senza contare che a volte Stefano telefonava in salumeria e lei non c’era e dare una spiegazione plausibile era arduo. Così, stretta tra le impazienze di Nino e le rimostranze del marito, invece che riguadagnare il senso della realtà e dirsi con chiarezza che si trovava in una situazione senza sbocco, Lila cominciò ad agire come se il mondo vero fosse un fondale o una scacchiera, e bastasse spostare uno scenario dipinto, muovere un po’ di pedine, ed ecco che il gioco, l’unica cosa che davvero contasse, il suo gioco, il gioco di loro due, poteva continuare a essere giocato. Quanto al futuro, il futuro diventò il giorno dopo e poi l’altro e poi ancora l’altro. O immagini improvvise di scempio e di sangue, molto presenti nei suoi quaderni. Non scriveva mai morirò ammazzata, ma annotava fatti di cronaca nera, a volte li reinventava. Erano storie di donne assassinate, insisteva sull’accanimento dell’assassino, sul sangue dappertutto. E ci metteva i dettagli che i giornali non riportavano: occhi cavati dalle orbite, danni causati dal coltello alla gola o agli organi interni, la lama che trapassava la mammella, i capezzoli tagliati, il ventre aperto dall’ombelico in giù, la lama che raschiava nei genitali. Pareva che anche alla realistica possibilità di morte violenta volesse togliere potenza riducendola a parole, a uno schema governabile.

We were like the Binary stars that were gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other; and from the earth seemed like a single star in the night sky but in reality, the distances between them were unreachable.

It is no longer possible for us to carry out the ceremony, as once we did, wrapped in the shining belt of the galaxy; but to achieve the effect as nearly as possible, Urth’s attractive field was excluded from the basilica. It was a novel sensation for me, and though I was unafraid, I was reminded again of that night I spent among the mountains when I felt myself on the point of falling off the world—something I will undergo in sober earnest tomorrow. At times the ceiling seemed a floor, or (what was to me far more disturbing) a wall became the ceiling, so that one looked upward through its open windows to see a mountainside of grass that lifted itself forever into the sky. Startling as it was, this vision was no less true than that we commonly see. Each of us became a sun; the circling, ivory skulls were our planets. I said we had dispensed with music, yet that was not entirely true, for as they swung about us there came a faint, sweet humming and whistling, caused by the flow of air through their eye sockets and teeth; those in nearly circular orbits maintained an almost steady note, varying only slightly as they rotated on their axes; the songs of those in elliptical orbits waxed and waned, rising as they approached me, sinking to a moan as they receded. How foolish we are to see in those hollow eyes and marble calottes only death. How many friends are among them! The brown book, which I carried so far, the only one of the possessions I took from the Matachin Tower that still remains with me, was sewn and printed and composed by men and women with those bony faces; and we, engulfed by their voices, now on behalf of those who are the past, offered ourselves and the present to the fulgurant light of the New Sun.

First, energy is quantised: in atoms it does not take on all possible values but only a ladder of specific values whose separation is fixed by the value of a new constant of Nature, dubbed Planck's constant and represented by the letter h. An intuitive picture of how the wavelike character of the orbital behaviour leads to quantisation can be seen in Figure 7.1, where we can see how only a whole number of wave cycles can fit into an orbit. Second, all particles possess a wavelike aspect. They behave as waves with a wavelength that is inversely proportional to their mass and velocity. When that quantum wavelength is much smaller than the physical size of the particle it will behave like a simple particle, but when its quantum wavelength becomes at least as large as the particle's size then wavelike quantum aspects will start to be significant and dominate the particle's behaviour, producing novel behaviour. Typically, as objects increase in mass, their quantum wavelengths shrink to become far smaller than their physical size, and they behave in a non-quantum or 'classical' way, like simple particles.

Pitching an unsolicited novel in those ancient days had about as much chance of success as spitting from high orbit and hitting a shot glass,

When I was little, and I thought that children grew up and their parents grew down, so that one day the child became the parent and the parent became the child, I had in my head such an impressive idea of what an adult was. My father seemed to me to know everything. My mother had such assurance and command. Inside my head was a little square of awe, compact and complete. They seemed as far away from me as a spaceship from the earth, orbiting in some darkness I could not comprehend. But now that I am an adult among adults, I am there. I am now here—in what once seemed like a stratosphere, another stratosphere entirely—but is this. This is the absolute outer limit of the human universe.

The day after Luke witnessed the orbital space battle through his macrobinoculars, a group of Jawa merchants sold two droids to Owen Lars. One of the droids, an astromech unit named R2-D2, carried a secret message for someone named Obi-Wan Kenobi. And Luke Skywalker’s life was forever changed.

The fact of zero He added nonstop: Did you know that zero was not used throughout human history! Until 781 A.D, when it was first embodied and used in arithmetic equations by the Arab scholar Al-Khwarizmi, the founder of algebra. Algorithms took their name from him, and they are algorithmic arithmetic equations that you have to follow as they are and you will inevitably get the result, the inevitable result. And before that, across tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, humans refused to deal with zero. While the first reference to it was in the Sumerian civilization, where inscriptions were found three thousand years ago in Iraq, in which the Sumerians indicated the existence of something before the one, they refused to deal with it, define it and give it any value or effect, they refused to consider it a number. All these civilizations, some of which we are still unable to decipher many of their codes, such as the Pharaonic civilization that refused to deal with zero! We see them as smart enough to build the pyramids with their miraculous geometry and to calculate the orbits of stars and planets with extreme accuracy, but they are very stupid for not defining zero in a way that they can deal with, and use it in arithmetic operations, how strange this really is! But in fact, they did not ignore it, but gave it its true value, and refused to build their civilizations on an unknown and unknown illusion, and on a wrong arithmetical frame of reference. Throughout their history, humans have looked at zero as the unknown, they refused to define it and include it in their calculations and equations, not because it has no effect, but because its true effect is unknown, and remaining unknown is better than giving it a false effect. Like the wrong frame of reference, if you rely on it, you will inevitably get a wrong result, and you will fall into the inevitability of error, and if you ignore it, your chance of getting it right remains. Throughout their history, humans have preferred to ignore zero, not knowing its true impact, while we simply decided to deal with it, and even rely on it. Today we build all our ideas, our civilization, our software, mathematics, physics, everything, on the basis that 1 + 0 equals one, because we need to find the effect of zero so that our equations succeed, and our lives succeed with, but what if 1 + 0 equals infinity?! Why did we ignore the zero in summation, and did not ignore it in multiplication?! 1×0 equals zero, why not one? What is the reason? He answered himself: There is no inevitable reason, we are not forced. Humans have lived throughout their ages without zero, and it did not mean anything to them. Even when we were unable to devise any result that fits our theorems for the quotient of one by zero, then we admitted and said unknown, and ignored it, but we ignored the logic that a thousand pieces of evidence may not prove me right, and one proof that proves me wrong. Not doing our math tables in the case of division, blowing them up completely, and with that, we decided to go ahead and built everything on that foundation. We have separated the arithmetic tables in detail at our will, to fit our calculations, and somehow separate the whole universe around us to fit these tables, despite their obvious flaws. And if we decide that the result of one multiplied by zero is one instead of zero, and we reconstruct the whole world on this basis, what will happen? He answered himself: Nothing, we will also succeed, the world, our software, our thoughts, our dealings, and everything around us will be reset according to the new arithmetic tables. After a few hundred years, humans will no longer be able to understand that one multiplied by zero equals zero, but that it must be one because everything is built on this basis.

The concept for this geostationary orbit space elevator actually was announced by NASA in the United States more than forty-seven years ago, in the year 2000. But at the time, it was projected for completion in 2062.” “Huh?! B-but that’s still…way ahead?” “Mmm. So why did they set a date so far in the future? Because in NASA’s plan, they were going to catch an asteroid passing close to the Earth and attach that to the tip of the cable stretching out above the station in geostationary orbit and use it as the weight.” “What?! They were going to catch an asteroid?!” “Exactly. The idea was that if they waited until ’62, a reasonable-size asteroid would luckily be flying by,

Since the speed of objects going around in geostationary orbit is basically perfectly synchronized with the rotation of the Earth, for all appearances, it never moves from that one spot in the sky above the Earth. Just as the name says, it’s stationary. Thus…” The line coming straight down from the square—the station in geostationary orbit—hit the Earth. “If you attach the end of the cable to the Earth, you get a tower like this. Or rather, a ladder that reaches from the Earth to space.

All these civilizations, some of which we are still unable to decipher many of their codes, such as the Pharaonic civilization that refused to deal with zero! We see them as smart enough to build the pyramids with their miraculous geometry and to calculate the orbits of stars and planets with extreme accuracy, but they are very stupid for not defining zero in a way that they can deal with, and use it in arithmetic operations, how strange this really is! But in fact, they did not ignore it, but gave it its true value, and refused to build their civilizations on an unknown and unknown illusion, and on a wrong arithmetical frame of reference. Throughout their history, humans have looked at zero as the unknown, they refused to define it and include it in their calculations and equations, not because it has no effect, but because its true effect is unknown, and remaining unknown is better than giving it a false effect.

My inspiration for this attack was a weapon that had been developed back in a country from my former world known as America. Commonly, they were called “rods from God.” Rods from God was an idea for a weapon that would drop metal rods from satellites orbiting in space. Upon impact, the rods would rival the power of nuclear weapons. There were problems with actually realizing this weapon, though. The cost of placing objects of that mass in space was prohibitive, and even if you did get the projectiles into space, keeping them from burning up in the atmosphere before they reached the ground was an issue as well.

from what our official accounts allow.28 Schwaller too recognized that whoever built the Sphinx, the Great Pyramid, and the temples at Luxor and Karnak was mathematically and cosmologically astute. From 1936 to 1951, Schwaller and his wife, Isha, herself the author of a series of novels about ancient Egypt (Her-Bak: Egyptian Initiate is the best known), studied the ancient Egyptian monuments. Schwaller found evidence in them for pi, but also for much more: a knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, of the Pythagorean theorem centuries in advance of Pythagoras, of the circumference of the globe, as well as evidence of ϕ (phi), known as the Golden Section, a mathematical proportion that was again supposedly unknown until it was discovered by the Greeks. As John Anthony West makes clear, the Golden Section is more than an important item in classical architecture. It is, according to Schwaller, the mathematical archetype of the universe, the reason why we have an “asymmetrical” “lumpy” world of galaxies and planets, and not a flattened-out, homogenous one, a question that today occupies contemporary cosmologists.29 In his writings, Schwaller linked phi to planetary orbits, to the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, and to plant and animal forms.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andy Weir built a career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of subjects such as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail. He lives in California.

This swamp, Elara, it murmurs secrets. You must simply écouter- listen closely. The ley lines converge here, but that's not all. The legend…une belle histoire, a beautiful story, of Aradia, the Moon Goddess, and Kealen, the first of our kind, echoes within these very trees. They say they loved each other deeply, their spirits entwined like the roots beneath our feet." He paused, allowing the weight of the story to settle. "But a sorcerer, consumed by jealousy and steeped in black magick, cursed them. He tore Aradia from Kealen's arms, banishing her to the lonely orbit of the moon, her light forever out of reach. And Kealen...he was bound to the form of the wolf, forever yearning for his lost love. Declan

It had to be on his terms. I had become a satellite orbiting him, circling him. Waiting on him.

Glynn Lunney was dead.