Showing posts with label 42. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 42. Show all posts

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Thursday extracts. Douglas Adams's sunrise.

The sadly missed Douglas Adams had an imagination matched by only a very few writers. His fantasy, comedy, science fiction, lunatic, indefinable genre, books were near perfect. He had a skill with words that leaves me breathless. Not just ordinary language, but the inventive names of his characters and places that leave the reader in little doubt about their natures. The man was a genius, and taken from us far too young. This tiny extract from Life, the Universe and Everything illustrates his style perfectly.

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Another world, another day, another dawn. The early morning's thinnest sliver of light appeared silently. Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

Douglas Adams. Life, the Universe and Everything.