Challenge 129

Disengaged, Re-engaged

The title of Ian Donnell Arbuckle’s poem “Elevators, Escalators, All the Travel Automators” is a mnemonic gnome, an alliterative, rhyming phrase that is liable to set up housekeeping in your short-term memory and keep repeating itself over and over. There is a cure for it, but I’ve forgotten what it is. Can anybody help?

The point of time travel is to correct something in the present: sometimes the corrections work; usually, though, something completely unforeseen happens. Saurbh Katyal and Vera Searles provide models for both kinds of stories, and yet they may have something in common. Can you find a similarity between Vera’s Allen and Saurbh’s Scott?

Jörn Grote’s “Green Fields of Mars” echoes strongly Robert A. Heinlein’s title The Green Hills of Earth, and thereby lies a challenge: What is the difference between Jörn Grote’s and Heinlein’s world views? Has technology changed science fiction’s perception of human nature in the last fifty years?

And finally an extra-credit question: How might one reasonably say that Jörn Grote’s “The Green Fields of Mars” and Vera Searle’s “The Glass Head” tell the same story — written from viewpoints worlds apart?