Tales of Pirx the Pilot

As often as he had been a spectator to this abrupt transition, it never ceased to jolt him into an awareness of something—something to which he found it hard to reconcile himself. Was it the lurid manifestation of man’s microscopic stature in relation to the cosmos? The transposition to another—planetary—scale? The visualization of mankind’s feeble

The closer they came to the bright sphere suspended in a black void, the more evident it was that the Moon was indeed a congealed, lava-caked version of the world as it must have existed billions of years ago, when the hot Earth wandered with its satellite through meteorite clouds and masses of planetisimals; when a continuous hailstorm of rock and

The whole ship jumped, the men jumped—in their straps, no less!—even the accelerometer was jumping around: 3.8, then 4.9, at one point pushing its way up to 5, only to plummet pusillanimously back down to 3. What were those rockets firing, anyway? Dumplings? With the ship now on full power, Pirx had to squeeze his helmet with both hands to hear the

to cite an old spaceman’s adage, nothing is ever lost in space: toss out a cigarette lighter, and all you have to do is to plot its trajectory and be in the right place at the right time, and the lighter, following its own orbital path, will with astronomical precision plop into your hand at the designated second.