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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