06 August 2012

They Despised The Soft Rains...


Some psychologists had claimed that it was almost impossible to understand fully the mentality of anyone born and bred on Mercury.  Forever exiled from Earth by its three-times-more-powerful gravity, Hermians could stand on the Moon and look across the narrow gap to the planet of their ancestors even of their own parents, but they could never visit it.  And so, inevitably, they claimed that they did not want to.
            They pretended to despise the soft rains, the rolling fields, the lakes and seas, the blue skies-all the things that they could know only through recordings.  Because their planet was drenched with such solar energy that the daytime temperature often reached six hundred degrees, they affected a rather swaggering toughness that did not bear a moment’s serious examination.  In fact, they tended to be physically weak, since they could survive only if they were totally insulated from their environment.  Even if he could have tolerated the gravity, a Hermian would have been quickly incapacitated by a hot day in any equatorial country on Earth.
Chapter 37, Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke


Maybe his characterization is weak, but he sure builds one hell of a universe…

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