Dragaera

Overcast

Thu Jul 17 07:43:10 PDT 2003

[Bouncing to the list, since I can't answer a question for Steve :-) ]

> 
> I thought this was amusing:
> 
>    There's a trick I like to pull on my friends. Standing in a large
>    city on an overcast night, I'll ask them to look down at the
>    sidewalk and tell me what color the sky is.  They invariably will
>    say black or, sometimes, dark blue.  Look up, I'll say.  And to
>    their astonishment the sky is neither black nor blue, but a dull,
>    smoky red - reflecting the orange glow of all those sodium and
>    mercury vapor streetlights.

For years, the winter nights in Boston have reminded me of the Overcast.
Hey Steve, was it actually based on/inspired by this real-world
phenomenon, or is the similarity just coincidence?

> Cut from an essay about SF & the future by Michael Swanwick:
> 
>    http://www.michaelswanwick.com/nonfic/future.html

Cool essay!  Thanks for the link.

Alexx

Alexx Kay
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employers
alexx at world.std.com
http://world.std.com/~alexx
"Basically, he said he felt that I was being, historically speaking,
 a little unfair and unnecessarily harsh in my portrayal of Queen
 Victoria and that reality flew out of the window whenever Fat Vicky
 made an appearance.  For my part I was surprised, since I thought
 reality had flown out of the window with the giant three-headed
 goat-god in chapter two."
    -- Alan Moore in correspondence with Dave Sim about _From Hell_