Novel World-Building:

Science Fiction

Mark Algee-Hewitt & Nichole Nomura

October 2018

Paradigmatic vs Syntagmatic Worldbuilding

Syntagmatic relations define combinatory possibilities: the relations between elements that might combine in a series. Paradigmatic relations are the oppositions between elements which can replace one another.

Culler, Ferdinand de Sassure

​

​

The author could, of course, try to explain systematically every datum, but this would be tedious and contrary to the "rules" of the genre. SF novels are elaborated in a way that makes them resemble a Hall of Mirrors in an amusement park - a labyrinth of glass which disorients the passers-by strolling through it. An immanent aesthetics of SF is implied here: if the mechanical transposition of "this-worldly" paradigms is sufficient to account for every narrative utterance, we have a witless, even infantile, type of SF. If, on the contrary, a maximum distance is maintained between the empirical and the "exotopic" paradigms, although the alien rules tend to organize themselves into a consistent whole, the reader's pleasure increases.

Angenot, “The Absent Paradigm”

​

​

​

Paradigmatic Narration:

explicit worldbuilding

Tagged test corpus: 20th-century science fiction

54 Novels (1905-2017)

xml-tagged for moments of explicit worldbuilding

mean number of tags per text (2)

mean length of the tag (3488 words)

Explicit Worldbuilding: Tagged Results

<EX>

“This is measles vaccine,” said the doctor, professionally deaf.

​

“No,” Shevek said.

​

The doctor chewed his lip for a moment and said, “Do you know what measles is, sir?”

​

“No.”

​

“A disease. Contagious. Often severe in adults. You don’t have it on Anarres; prophylactic measures kept it out when the planet was settled. It’s common on Urras. It could kill you. So could a dozen other common viral infections. You have no resistance. Are you right-handed, sir?”

</EX>

​

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Explicit Worldbuilding: Tagged Results

Words and POS distinctive of explicit worldbuilding (100 resampled iterations)

Explicit Worldbuilding: Tagged Results

Words and POS distinctive of non-worldbuilding text (100 resampled iterations)

microgeneric worldbuilding

Test Corpus: Asimov

17 Science Fiction Novels (published between 1950 and 1993)

26 Science Texts (including popular science books and articles - equivalent

word count and date range)

Feature Set:

Corpus divided into 20 and 50 sentence segments, for each segment:

​

1. POS Tags (Penn Treebank) – percentage of each per segment

​

• Number of Named Entity Persons

​

• Number of Named Entity Places

​

• Average length of sentence

​

• Mean number of clauses per sentence

Modeling:

Linear Discriminant Analysis Classification Model

​

1. Separate corpus into training and test sets (by book)

​

• Down-sample each discipline and text to ensure comparative lengths

​

• Return:

​

• Classification percentage for all test corpus (10-fold cross-validation)

​

• Assigned Class/Discipline for each segment

​

• Posterior probabilities of membership in each discipline for each segment

Classification success rate, 50-sent. slices

Asimov, Second Foundation

50 sentence slices

Asimov, Second Foundation

50 sentence slices

36

41

Second Foundation, Section 36

...She intoned, with dramatic fervor: “The Future of Seldon’s Plan. “The Foundation’s past history is, I am sure, well-known to all of us who have had the good fortune to be educated in our planet’s efficient and well-staffed school system. (There! That would start things off right with Miss Erlking, that mean old hag.) That past history is largely the past history of the great Plan of Hari Seldon. The two are one. But the question in the mind of most people today is whether this Plan will continue in all its great wisdom, or whether it will be foully destroyed, or, perhaps, has been so destroyed already. “To understand this, it may be best to pass quickly over some of the highlights of the Plan as it has been revealed to humanity thus far. (This part was easy because she had taken Modern History the semester before.) “In the days, nearly four centuries ago, when the First Galactic Empire was decaying into the paralysis that preceded final death, one man—the great Hari Seldon—foresaw the approaching end. Through the science of psychohistory, the intrissacies of whose mathematics has long since been forgotten, (She paused in a trifle of doubt. She was sure that “intricacies” was pronounced with soft c’s but the spelling didn’t look right. Oh, well, the machine couldn’t very well be wrong—) he and the men who worked with him are able to foretell the course of the great social and economic currents sweeping the Galaxy at the time. It was possible for them to realize that, left to itself, the Empire would break up, and that thereafter there would be at least thirty thousand years of anarchic chaos prior to the establishment of a new Empire. “It was too late to prevent the great Fall, but it was still possible, at least, to cut short the intermediate period of chaos. The Plan was, therefore, evolved whereby only a single millennium would separate the Second Empire from the First. We are completing the fourth century of that millennium, and many generations of men have lived and died while the Plan has continued its inexorable workings. “Hari Seldon established two Foundations at the opposite ends of the Galaxy, in a manner and under such circumstances as would yield the best mathematical solution for his psychohistorical problem. In one of these, our Foundation, established here on Terminus, there was concentrated the physical science of the Empire, and through the possession of that science, the Foundation was able to withstand the attacks of the barbarous kingdoms which had broken away and become independent, out at the fringe of the Empire. ...

Second Foundation, Section 41

...Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication—but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling. Down—down—the results can be followed; and all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located—so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation—there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man. Feet, for tens of thousands of years, had clogged and shuffled in the mud—and held down the minds which, for an equal time, had been fit for the companionship of the stars. Grimly, Man had instinctively sought to circumvent the prison bars of ordinary speech. Semantics, symbolic logic, psychoanalysis—they had all been devices whereby speech could either be refined or bypassed. Psychohistory had been the development of mental science, the mathematicization thereof, rather, which had finally succeeded. Through the development of the mathematics necessary to understand the facts of neural physiology and the electrochemistry of the nervous system, which themselves had to be, had to be, traced down to nuclear forces, it first became possible to truly develop psychology. And through the generalization of psychological knowledge from the individual to the group, sociology was also mathematicized. The larger groups; the billions that occupied planets; the trillions that occupied Sectors; the quadrillions that occupied the whole Galaxy, became, not simply human beings, but gigantic forces amenable to statistical treatment—so that to Hari Seldon, the future became clear and inevitable, and the Plan could be set up.

What the Reader Sees

It was too late to prevent the great Fall, but it was still possible, at least, to cut short the intermediate period of chaos. The Plan was, therefore, evolved whereby only a single millennium would separate the Second Empire from the First. We are completing the fourth century of that millennium, and many generations of men have lived and died while the Plan has continued its inexorable workings. “Hari Seldon established two Foundations at the opposite ends of the Galaxy, in a manner and under such circumstances as would yield the best mathematical solution for his psychohistorical problem. In one of these, our Foundation, established here on Terminus, there was concentrated the physical science of the Empire, and through the possession of that science, the Foundation was able to withstand the attacks of the barbarous kingdoms which had broken away and become independent, out at the fringe of the Empire.

What the Computer Sees

PRP VBD RB JJ TO VB DT JJ NN , CC PRP VBD RB JJ , IN JJS , TO VB JJ DT JJ NN IN NN . DT NNP VBD , RB , VBD WRB RB DT JJ NN MD VB DT JJ NN IN DT NNP . PRP VBP VBG DT JJ NN IN DT NN , CC JJ NNS IN NNS VBP VBN CC VBN IN DT NNP VBZ VBN PRP$ JJ NNS . NNP NNP VBD CD NNS IN DT JJ NNS IN DT NNP , IN DT NN CC IN JJ NNS RB MD VB DT JJS JJ NN IN PRP$ JJ NN . IN CD IN DT , PRP$ NNP , VBN RB IN NNP , EX VBD VBN DT JJ NN IN DT NNP , CC IN DT NN IN DT NN , DT NNP VBD JJ TO VB DT NNS IN DT JJ NNS WDT VBD VBN RB CC VB JJ , RB IN DT NN IN DT NNP .

Feature Correlation: Novel vs Science (50 sentences)

Classification Success Rate, 20-sent. slices

Asimov, Second Foundation

20 sent. slices

116

269

46

Second Foundation, Section 46

They asked if it were difficult to handle a spaceship, how many men were required for the job, if better motors could be made for their ground-cars, if it was true that it rarely snowed on other worlds as was said to be the case with Tazenda, how many people lived on their world, if it was as large as Tazenda, if it was far away, how their clothes were woven and what gave them the metallic shimmer, why they did not wear furs, if they shaved every day, what sort of stone that was in Pritcher’s ring— The list stretched out. And almost always the questions were addressed to Pritcher as though, as the elder, they automatically invested him with the greater authority. Pritcher found himself forced to answer at greater and greater length. It was like an immersion in a crowd of children. Their questions were those of utter and disarming wonder. Their eagerness to know was completely irresistible and would not be denied. Pritcher explained that spaceships were not difficult to handle and that crews varied with the size, from one to many, that the motors of their ground-cars were unknown in detail to him but could doubtless be improved, that the climates of worlds varied almost infinitely, that many hundreds of millions lived on his world but that it was far smaller and more insignificant than the great empire of Tazenda, that their clothes were woven of silicone plastics in which metallic luster was artificially produced by proper orientation of the surface molecules, and that they could be artificially heated so that furs were unnecessary, that they shaved every day, that the stone in his ring was an amethyst. The list stretched out. He found himself thawing to these naive provincials against his will. And always as he answered there was a rapid chatter among the Elders, as though they debated the information gained. It was difficult to follow these inner discussions of theirs for they lapsed into their own accented version of the universal Galactic language that, through long separation from the currents of living speech, had become archaic. Almost, one might say, their curt comments among themselves hovered on the edge of understanding, but just managed to elude the clutching tendrils of comprehension. Until finally Channis interrupted to say, “Good sirs, you must answer us for a while, for we are strangers and would be very much interested to know all we can of Tazenda.”

​

​

Second Foundation, Section 116

It was less respectable because less immediately useful; and it was poorly financed since it was less profitable. After the disintegration of the First Empire, there came the fragmentation of organized science, back, back—past even the fundamentals of nuclear power into the chemical power of coal and oil. The one exception to this, of course, was the First Foundation where the spark of science, revitalized and grown more intense, was maintained and fed to flame. Yet there, too, it was the physical that ruled, and the brain, except for surgery, was neglected ground. Hari Seldon was the first to express what afterwards came to be accepted as truth. “Neural microcurrents,” he once said, “carry within them the spark of every varying impulse and response, conscious and unconscious. The brainwaves recorded on neatly squared paper in trembling peaks and troughs are the mirrors of the combined thought-pulses of billions of cells. Theoretically, analysis should reveal the thoughts and emotions of the subject, to the last and least. Differences should be detected that are due not only to gross physical defects, inherited or acquired, but also to shifting states of emotion, to advancing education and experience, even to something as subtle as a change in the subject’s philosophy of life.” But even Seldon could approach no further than speculation. And now for fifty years, the men of the First Foundation had been tearing at that incredibly vast and complicated storehouse of new knowledge. The approach, naturally, was made through new techniques—as, for example, the use of electrodes at skull sutures by a newly developed means which enabled contact to be made directly with the gray cells, without even the necessity of shaving a patch of skull. And then there was a recording device which automatically recorded the brainwave data as an overall total, and as separate functions of six independent variables. What was most significant, perhaps, was the growing respect in which encephalography and the encephalographer were held. Kleise, the greatest of them, sat at scientific conventions on an equal basis with the physicist. Dr. Darell, though no longer active in the science, was known for his brilliant advances in encephalographic analysis almost as much as for the fact that he was the son of Bayta Darell, the great heroine of the past generation….

​

Feature Correlation: Novel vs Science (20 Sentences)

Syntagmatic Narration:

(im)probability and worldbuilding

"I'll do it," Kaitlyn said. "I was elected Secretary of the Student Council twice." Mark Spitz shuddered as if bitten: to admit such a thing without a smidgen of self-consciousness. To say it with pride. Who on the planet had put those words together in that sequence since the outbreak: Secretary of the Student Council? It was a half-recalled lullaby overheard on the street, cooed by some young mom bent over her kid in the summer glare, rekindling innocence: Secretary of the Student Council.

(Colson Whitehead, Zone One pg 54).

​

“... Heinlein has always managed to indicate the greater strangeness of a culture with the most casually dropped-in reference: the first time in a novel, I believe it was in Beyond This Horizon, that a character came through a door that … dilated. And no discussion. Just: "The door dilated." I read across it, and was two lines down before I realized what the image had been, what the words had called forth. A dilating door. It didn't open, it irised! Dear God, now I knew I was in a future world …”

(Harlan Ellison, on Heinlein)

​

256 Science Fiction Novels (published between 1905 and 2017)

141 Novels labeled as “Realism” (same publishing Range)

311,580 Journal Articles from Scientific American and British Journal of Medicine

Full Corpus: SciFi vs Realism + Science

Sequence Improbabilities: The ”laser” problem

Realism + Science

Science Fiction

Most Distinctive Words: SciFi vs Realism

log₂ (zeta)

zeta

ζ = (number of sampled segments with term in corpus i) - (number of sampled segments with term in corpus j (Schöch et al. 2018)

Improbable Word Combinations

The probability of word x following word y in corpus i (scaled by the sum of their zeta scores in corpus i) minus the probability of word x following word y in corpus j (scaled by the sum of their zeta scores in corpus j)

Most Improbable Word Sequences (SciFi vs Realism)

Most Improbable Word Sequences (SciFi vs Realism+Jstor)

He recognized the identity without an effort. It was Channis. Here the Mule saw no uniformity, but the primitive diversity of a strong mind, untouched and unmolded except by the manifold disorganizations of the universe. It writhed in floods and waves. There was caution on the surface, a thin, smoothing effect, but with touches of cynical ribaldry in the hidden eddies of it. And underneath there was the strong flow of self-interest and self-love, with a gush of cruel humor here and there, and a deep, still pool of ambition underlying all.

The Mule felt that he could reach out and dam the current, wrench the pool from its basin and turn it in another course, dry up one flow and begin another. But what of it? If he could bend Channis’ curly head in the profoundest adoration, would that change his own grotesquerie that made him shun the day and love the night, that made him a recluse inside an empire that was unconditionally his?

The door behind him opened, and he turned. The transparency of the wall faded to opacity, and the darkness gave way to the whitely blazing artifice of nuclear power.

[...]

​

“Judge for yourself when I’m done. Listen, you’re not of the Foundation. You’re a native of Kalgan, aren’t you? Yes. Well, then, your knowledge of the Seldon plan may be vague. When the first Galactic Empire was falling, Hari Seldon and a group of psychohistorians, analyzing the future course of history by mathematical tools no longer available in these degenerate times, set up two Foundations, one at each end of the Galaxy, in such a way that the economic and sociological forces that were slowly evolving would make them serve as foci for the Second Empire. Hari Seldon planned on a thousand years to accomplish that—and it would have taken thirty thousand without the Foundations. But he couldn’t count on me. I am a mutant and I am unpredictable by psychohistory, which can only deal with the average reactions of numbers. Do you understand?”

​

​

​

Second Foundation, section 5

The science of electroencephalography was at once new and old. It was old in the sense that the knowledge of the microcurrents generated by nerve cells of living beings belonged to that immense category of human knowledge whose origin was completely lost. It was knowledge that stretched back as far as the earliest remnants of human history—

And yet it was new, too. The fact of the existence of microcurrents slumbered through the tens of thousands of years of Galactic Empire as one of those vivid and whimsical, but quite useless, items of human knowledge. Some had attempted to form classifications of waves into waking and sleeping, calm and excited, well and ill—but even the broadest conceptions had had their hordes of vitiating exceptions.

Others had tried to show the existence of brainwave groups, analogous to the well-known blood groups, and to show that external environment was not the defining factor. These were the race-minded people who claimed that humanity could be divided into subspecies. But such a philosophy could make no headway against the overwhelming ecumenical drive involved in the fact of Galactic Empire—one political unit covering twenty million stellar systems, involving all of Man from the central world of Trantor—now a gorgeous and impossible memory of the great past—to the loneliest asteroid on the periphery.

And then again, in a society given over, as that of the First Empire was, to the physical sciences and inanimate technology, there was a vague but mighty sociological push away from the study of the mind. It was less respectable because less immediately useful; and it was poorly financed since it was less profitable.

After the disintegration of the First Empire, there came the fragmentation of organized science, back, back—past even the fundamentals of nuclear power into the chemical power of coal and oil. The one exception to this, of course, was the First Foundation where the spark of science, revitalized and grown more intense, was maintained and fed to flame. Yet there, too, it was the physical that ruled, and the brain, except for surgery, was neglected ground.

​

​

Second Foundation, section 29

“You watch this door,” he muttered, “it’s about to open again. I can tell by the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly generates.”

With an ingratiating little whine the door slid open again and Marvin stomped through.

“Come on,” he said.

The others followed quickly and the door slid back into place with pleased little clicks and whirrs.

“Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation,” said Marvin, and trudged desolately up the gleaming curved corridor that stretched out before them. “Let’s build robots with Genuine People Personalities, they said. So they tried it out with me. I’m a personality prototype. You can tell, can’t you?”

Ford and Arthur muttered embarrassed little disclaimers.

“I hate that door,” continued Marvin. “I’m not getting you down at all, am I?”

[...]

“. . . and news reports brought to you here on the sub-etha wave band, broadcasting around the Galaxy around the clock,” squawked a voice, “and we’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere . . . and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys. And of course, the big news story tonight is the sensational theft of the new Improbability Drive prototype ship by none other than Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox. And the question everyone’s asking is . . . has the Big Z finally flipped? Beeblebrox, the man who invented the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, ex-confidence trickster, once described by Eccentrica Gallumbits as the Best Bang since the Big One, and recently voted the Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe for the seventh time . . . has he got an answer this time? We asked his private brain care specialist Gag Halfrunt . . .”

​

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, section 29

When he was back in his rooms, after dinner in the Senior Faculty Refectory, he sat down alone by the unlighted fire. It was summer in A-Io, getting on towards the longest day of the year, and though it was past eight it was not yet dark. The sky outside the arched windows still showed a tinge of the daylight color of the sky, a pure tender blue. The air was mild, fragrant of cut grass and wet earth. There was a light in the chapel, across the grove, and a faint undertone of music on that lightly stirring air. Not the birds singing, but a human music. Shevek listened. Somebody was practicing the Numerical Harmonies of the chapel harmonium. They were as familiar to Shevek as to any Urrasti. Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.

The large, calm room was shadowy and silent, darkening. Shevek looked around it, the perfect double arches of the windows, the faintly gleaming edges of the parquet floor, the strong, dim curve of the stone chimney, the paneled walls, admirable in their proportion. It was a beautiful and humane room. It was a very old room. This Senior Faculty House, they told him, had been built in the year 540, four hundred years ago, two hundred and thirty years before the Settlement of Anarres. Generations of scholars had lived, worked, talked, thought, slept, died in this room before Odo was ever born. The Numerical Harmonies had drifted over the lawn, through the dark leaves of the grove, for centuries. I have been here for a long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am still here. What are you doing here?

He had no answer. He had no right to all the grace and bounty of this world, earned and maintained by the work, the devotion, the faithfulness of its people. Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history. The Settlers of Anarres had turned their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.

He had come to love Urras, but what good was his yearning love? He was not part of it. Nor was he part of it. Nor was he part of the world of his birth.

​

The Dispossessed section 22

People were trying to take his coat off. He struggled against them, afraid they were after the notebook in his shirt pocket. Somebody spoke authoritatively in a foreign language. Somebody else said to him, “It’s all right. He’s trying to find out if you’re hurt. Your coat’s bloody.”

“Another man,” Shevek said. “Another man’s blood.”

He managed to sit up, though his head swam. He was on a couch in a large, sunlit room; apparently he had fainted. A couple of men and a woman stood near him. He looked at them without understanding.

“You are in the Embassy of Terra, Dr. Shevek. You are on Terran soil here. You are perfectly safe. You can stay here as long as you want.”

The woman’s skin was yellow-brown, like ferrous earth, and hairless, except on the scalp; not shaven, but hairless. The features were strange and childlike, small mouth, low-bridged nose, eyes with long full lids, cheeks and chin rounded, fat-padded. The whole figure was rounded, supple, childlike.

“You are safe here,” she repeated.

He tried to speak, but could not. One of the men pushed him gently on the chest, saying, “Lie down, lie down.” He lay back, but he whispered, “I want to see the Ambassador.”

“I’m the Ambassador. Keng is my name. We are glad you came to us. You are safe here. Please rest now, Dr. Shevek, and we’ll talk later. There is no hurry.” Her voice had an odd, singsong quality, but it was husky, like Takver’s voice.

​

The Dispossessed section 22

improbable bigrams

Most Improbable Word Sequences (SciFi vs Realism+Jstor)

by the scale why would you do all this whatever for you mustnt think of the universe as a wilderness it hasnt been that for billions of years he said think of it more as cultivated again a tingling but what for whats there to cultivate the basic problem is easily stated � (Sagan, Contact)

more than mere simulations the ocshtn was part of the worldweb all thing the realtime network which governed hegemony politics fed information to tens of billions of datahungry citizens and had evolved a form of autonomy and consciousness all its own more than a hundred and fifty planetary dataspheres mingled their resources� (Simmons, Hyperion)

rivers here again the rise of global waterlevels would have been little more than a few feet but the huge discharging channels carried with them billions of tons of topsoil massive deltas formed at their mouths extending the continental coastlines and damming up the oceans their effective spread shrank from twothirds of� (Ballard, The Drowned World)

billions_of

theoretical scale

speculated that it might be possible to build a computer using the quantum attributes of atoms theoretically such a quantum computer would be billions and billions of times more powerful than any computer ever made but feynmans idea implied a genuinely new technologya technology that had to be built from scratch a (Crichton, Timeline)

​

​

like/as

a few questions okay she nodded and he continued think of what consciousness feels like what it feels like this minute does that feel like billions of tiny atoms wiggling in place and beyond the biological machinery where in science can a child learn what love is heres her beeper buzzed it (Sagan, Contact)

​

​

signaling science

the two men look at ease he said reprovingly teena you are an excellent engineer and a lousy diplomat what oh nonsense i saved them billions of nanoseconds shut up dear your circuits are scrambled justin minerva is almost certainly the only girl on this planet who could be fussed by teenas (Heinlein, Time Enough for Love)

​

​

incomprehensibility

and march in grand processions do you think hes put there just to enjoy himself the boy considered perhaps not he rules over billions upon billions of people across territories so huge we cant comprehend them everything falls on his shoulders to carry out the decrees of the pontifex to sustain order (Silverburg, Lord Valentine’s Castle)

billions_of

Improbable bigrams

Improbable bigrams: character names

Improbable bigrams: contractions

Improbable bigrams: space words

Improbable bigrams: human_beings

Improbable bigrams: Systems

Conclusions and Hypotheses

Hypothesis: Patterns of Improbability

Hypothesis: Hierarchy of Syntagma

Hypothesis: Genre/Microgenre

Appendix

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Mrs Whatsit answered, taking off the hat and the stole. “It isn’t so much that I lost my way as that I got blown off course. And when I realized that I was at little Charles Wallace’s house I thought I’d just come in and rest a bit before proceeding on my way.”

“How did you know this was Charles Wallace’s house?” Meg asked.

“By the smell.” Mrs Whatsit untied a blue and green paisley scarf, a red and yellow flowered print, a gold Liberty print, a red and black bandanna. Under all this a sparse quantity of grayish hair was tied in a small but tidy knot on top of her head. Her eyes were bright, her nose a round, soft blob, her mouth puckered like an autumn apple. “My, but it’s lovely and warm in here,” she said.

“Do sit down.” Mrs. Murry indicated a chair. “Would you like a sandwich, Mrs Whatsit? I’ve had liverwurst and cream cheese; Charles has had bread and jam; and Meg, lettuce and tomato.”

“Now, let me see,” Mrs Whatsit pondered. “I’m passionately fond of Russian caviar.”

“You peeked!” Charles cried indignantly. “We’re saving that for Mother’s birthday and you can’t have any!”

Mrs Whatsit gave a deep and pathetic sigh.

“No,” Charles said. “Now, you mustn’t give in to her, Mother, or I shall be very angry. How about tuna-fish salad?”

“All right,” Mrs Whatsit said meekly.

“I’ll fix it,” Meg offered, going to the pantry for a can of tuna fish.

—For crying out loud, she thought,—this old woman comes barging in on us in the middle of the night and Mother takes it as though there weren’t anything peculiar about it at all. I’ll bet she is the tramp. I’ll bet she did steal those sheets. And she’s certainly no one Charles Wallace ought to be friends with, especially when he won’t even talk to ordinary people.

“I’ve only been in the neighborhood a short time,” Mrs Whatsit was saying as Meg switched off the pantry light and came back into the kitchen with the tuna fish, “and I didn’t think I was going to like the neighbors at all until dear little Charles came over with his dog.”

​

A Wrinkle in Time, section 5

“Are there any plants down there?” Paul asked.

“Some,” Kynes said. “This latitude’s life-zone has mostly what we call minor water stealers—adapted to raiding each other for moisture, gobbling up the trace-dew. Some parts of the desert teem with life. But all of it has learned how to survive under these rigors. If you get caught down there, you imitate that life or you die.”

“You mean steal water from each other?” Paul asked. The idea outraged him, and his voice betrayed his emotion.

“It’s done,” Kynes said, “but that wasn’t precisely my meaning. You see, my climate demands a special attitude toward water. You are aware of water at all times. You waste nothing that contains moisture.”

And the Duke thought: “…my climate!”

“Come around two degrees more southerly, my Lord,” Kynes said. “There’s a blow coming up from the west.”

The Duke nodded. He had seen the billowing of tan dust there. He banked the ’thopter around, noting the way the escort’s wings reflected milky orange from the dust-refracted light as they turned to keep pace with him.

“This should clear the storm’s edge,” Kynes said.

“That sand must be dangerous if you fly into it,” Paul said. “Will it really cut the strongest metals?”

“At this altitude, it’s not sand but dust,” Kynes said. “The danger is lack of visibility, turbulence, clogged intakes.”

“We’ll see actual spice mining today?” Paul asked.

“Very likely,” Kynes said.

Paul sat back. He had used the questions and hyperawareness to do what his mother called “registering” the person. He had Kynes now—tone of voice, each detail of face and gesture. An unnatural folding of the left sleeve on the man’s robe told of a knife in an arm sheath. The waist bulged strangely. It was said that desert men wore a belted sash into which they tucked small necessities. Perhaps the bulges came from such a sash—certainly not from a concealed shield belt. A copper pin engraved with the likeness of a hare clasped the neck of Kynes’ robe. Another smaller pin with similar likeness hung at the corner of the hood which was thrown back over his shoulders.

​

​

Dune section 23

It wasn’t the lighter that excited Stilgar’s awe, Paul knew, but the construction for which the lighter was only the centerpost. A single metal hutment, many stories tall, reached out in a thousand-meter circle from the base of the lighter—a tent composed of interlocking metal leaves—the temporary lodging place for five legions of Sardaukar and His Imperial Majesty, the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.

From his position squatting at Paul’s left, Gurney Halleck said: “I count nine levels to it. Must be quite a few Sardaukar in there.”

“Five legions,” Paul said.

“It grows light,” Stilgar hissed. “We like it not, your exposing yourself, Muad’Dib. Let us go back into the rocks now.”

“I’m perfectly safe here,” Paul said.

“That ship mounts projectile weapons,” Gurney said.

“They believe us protected by shields,” Paul said. “They wouldn’t waste a shot on an unidentified trio even if they saw us.”

Paul swung the telescope to scan the far wall of the basin, seeing the pockmarked cliffs, the slides that marked the tombs of so many of his father’s troopers. And he had a momentary sense of the fitness of things that the shades of those men should look down on this moment. The Harkonnen forts and towns across the shielded lands lay in Fremen hands or cut away from their source like stalks severed from a plant and left to wither. Only this basin and its city remained to the enemy.

“They might try a sortie by ’thopter,” Stilgar said. “If they see us.”

“Let them,” Paul said. “We’ve ’thopters to burn today…and we know a storm is coming.”

He swung the telescope to the far side of the Arrakeen landing field now, to the Harkonnen frigates lined up there with a CHOAM Company banner waving gently from its staff on the ground beneath them. And he thought of the desperation that had forced the Guild to permit these two groups to land while all the others were held in reserve. The Guild was like a man testing the sand with his toe to gauge its temperature before erecting a tent.

“Is there anything new to see from here?” Gurney asked. “We should be getting under cover. The storm is coming.”

​

Dune section 91