Word: planet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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LISTEN: the most fascinating thing about this book is the way Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian understanding of time to deal with the importance of death. Tralfamadore is the planet 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away, to which Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped. Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments of time in the same way we can look at a whole range of the Rocky Mountains. For those who can travel in time (Billy Pilgrim can and does) any particular moment can be visited. Nothing is "future"; nothing is "past." All moments exist, always have, and always will...
Mountain Time. He visits the planet Tralfamadore (which Vonnegut invented several books ago) in a flying saucer, and learns from little green men there that time is not a river, as earthlings think, but an unmoving phenomenon like a mountain range, continually visible to the Tralfamadorians from one end to the other. Since he has become unstuck in time, like the flying-saucer people, Billy, too, experiences many times over the events of his life, repeatedly returning to recollections of Dresden, and the great fire that followed. No one of these occurrences seems more unusual to Billy than...
...looking for. "There was the water-pow!" he says. The dark absorption lines, which stood out "as bold as fence posts," revealed that all the water vapor in the Martian atmosphere equals about a cubic mile of water, less than in a large lake on earth. Spread over the planet's surface, it would be only a thousandth of an inch deep. There was about twice as much water vapor in the Northern Hemisphere (where it is now late summer) than in the southern half (where it is late winter). This suggests that the excess vapor in the north...
Nobody can beat the exhilaration of a pessimist who thinks the end-time has come. Writing slightly bad-tasting novels (Myra Breckinridge) and bland-tasting plays (Visit to a Small Planet) is just the start for Vidal. He keeps busy as an opinion maker, staging shoot-outs with William Buckley on TV and churning out some of the liveliest doomsday journalism ever, mostly in today's essay form, the book review...
...good use of their time to gain experience in navigation and tracking-skills that will be vital for landing Spider on the moon and returning to a lunar-orbit rendezvous with Gumdrop. In addition to plotting their position by star sightings, they became the first spacemen to use the planet Jupiter for a navigational reference. The astronauts also twice sighted and tracked Pegasus, a giant satellite orbited in 1965 to record meteor hits. Pointing their scanning telescope toward earth, they obtained fixes on islands, capes and other landmarks to establish Apollo's precise position in space...