Ah’d like tae get my hands oan the tube wha picked me tae be stuck in this spinnin space cylinder fur a lifetime.
AND the tube wha decided tae shunt us aff intae interstellar space fur generations wi aw the beasts ahn trees in here shrunk tae a third o their size.
Awthin is shrunk – except us as far as we ken.
The robot minders though are a lot bigger than I remember from wey back when I was goin aboot mindin my own business back on oor hame planet when the bloody things grabbed me and pit me in here.
Translate:
Tube, choob: an insult, probably along the lines, I’d like to think, of meaning ‘so useless that your purpose is only for turning food going in one end to crap coming out from the other’.
I would like to get my hands on the good for nothing who picked me to be stuck in this spinning cylinder for a lifetime.
AND the bounder who decided to shunt us off into interstellar space for generations with all the animals and trees inside this thing shrunk to a third of their original size.
Everything is shrunk – except us as far as we know.
The robot minders though are a lot bigger than I remember from way back when I was going about minding my own business on our home planet when the bloody things grabbed me and put me in here.
ˈʧub
The Scottish Word: tube with its definition and its meaning illustrated and captioned with the word used in context in the Scots language and in English.
Bonus.
Can you find the map showing Africa, Europe and the America’s hidden in the image?
The Seedling Stars
I’m at the moment reading ‘Aurora’ by Kim Stanley Robinson which has an ark style spacecraft on an interstellar journey which inspired this drawing I think.
Although in that story the habitats are inside rotating rings with a ‘floor’ on the outer surface and a ‘ceiling’ on the inner facing towards the central hub. The biological engineering in his book was restricted to mental enhancements – which on the generational journey seems to be reverting to baseline.
Alasdair Reynolds in his series ‘Posiedon’s Children’ had elephants that were shrunk to facilitate their journey into space and an attempt to retain the self aware intelligence they had been gifted.
But my earliest recollection of reading about shrinking animals, in this case humans themselves, was in James Blish’s ‘The Seedling Stars’ 1957. Particularly in the episode ‘Surface Tension’ first published in 1952. I read them much later than they were published.
In that story the microscopic humans lived in water in rock pools shared with sentient unicellular animals. Space was dry land and the technological journey was to get from one rock pool to another.