AYOOOAH!
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Greetings from Scotland!
Just to add to the speculation about Jink's ancestry - apparently there is some Caledonian blood in her too. Well, she has a Scottish name.
I know, I know, you said in #1 that the word "jink" was used by fighter pilots to describe aerial maneuvers. I don't doubt your word, but whatever pilot first used it in that intent and taught it to his friends was plainly a Scot. "Jink" is an old Scots word meaning to dart about quickly, to dodge. Robert Lewis Stevenson, who was dead long before the Wright Brothers got off the ground, used it in some reminiscences of his childhood - his ability to jink made him very good at playing tag.
Interestingly the Scots dictionary I consulted gives a secondary meaning - a "jink" is a flirt. Not really applicable to fighter pilots, at least not in connection with the enemy, but I suppose Jink would be called a flirt... if I was being kind. I fear her lack of inhibition and fondness for presents would have led my puritanical ancestors to dub her a "hoor".
Kathleen Glancy
<<street address removed from archive>>
It's Quibblin' Time!
Quibble #1: If Abode spaceships can generate artificial gravity, why do their occupants suffer from g-forces during acceleration? If they're accelerating at 7-gee they could just generate a 6-gee field in the opposite direction to compensate.
The only possible explanation (i.e.. rationalization!) is that they can't generate g-fields stronger than 1-gee. (But technology is ever advancing and one day they will.) (Incidentally: I assume the ship's g-field is oriented "down" toward the rear of the hull. Other- wise, the product of artificial gravity and acceleration would make the floor seem to slope steeply!)
Quibble #2: What is jinking? In Jink Ink #2, Richard clearly says: "It's true-she moves really fast but doesn't teleport." Oh yeah? Richard, there is NO WAY she could "move really fast" through a solid spaceship hull!!! (#3 pp. 18-20). Even if she could move rapidly to an airlock, she couldn't make it cycle fast enough. In any case the artwork on pp 18-20 seems to show her jinking through solid matter. (Although on p. 18 panel 6 it seems she has to move a trapdoor cover aside to get through. I'm getting very confused here.) Real teleportation would stretch the laws of physics (and capability) a lot more, but it'd be more FUN, dammit!
Quibble #3: Having gone to the trouble of disguising herself as a human, how come she keeps admitting she's an elf? (Reminds me of a line from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [radio version]: "Ever since you got here you've been telling people you're Zophod Beeblebrox, but they're not to tell anyone else!") And once everyone knows what she is (#3 p.17) why doesn't she drop the disguise? I believe there may be a precedent for having a point-eared character on board a spaceship.
This brings me to another point (no pun intended, but it's there any way) which is not exactly a quibble, just something that's been puzzling me about the whole business. (Some of this may have been explained in #1, which I haven't got yet. I hate skipping, damn and blast it!)
Namely: Why, in order to control an alien threat, did the Government of Abode turn to someone who is not only believed to be an alien of unknown origin and potentially hostile to Humanity, but who is also known as a thief? And what kind of offer could they have made her that she didn't refuse? What, in other words, really happened forty years ago?
You know, if I were an Abode scientist, the first thing I'd want from Jink (well, all right, the second, although the first wouldn't strictly count as scientific research) (Anyone who thinks I'm making a sexist false assumption here is making a false assumption) would be a DNA sample. And wouldn't I be surprised to find wolf genes? Well, maybe not, if I'd heard her howl...
Another question. Where did human psionics get their powers from? It took the Coneheads zillions of years to develop theirs, but the humans have acquired theirs in a mere 30-odd generations. Could there be any significance in the fact that human telepathy works on the same "wavelengths" as Jink's sending?
Another thing the humans have acquired with suspicious ease is political unity. I mean, one Government for the whole Threksh't-cursed planet?! Here on poor old Earth they can't even agree on a single currency for Europe. For that matter they're still arguing about the future of one small piece of the British Isles...
Ah, but! The one thing Abode has and we don't, outside comic books, is elves. There aren't many of them, but they've long-lived and many of them have psi powers that humans would sell their souls for. Just suppose the elves all over Abode coordinated their efforts toward creating a human society that would be, among other things, less hostile to elves? A nudge here, a whispered idea there... and what you end up with is not a polluted, politically-divided, ecologically unstable mess, but the "clean place" that is modern Abode. And humans with psi powers. And a space program that worked.
Lee Mendham
<<street address removed from archive>>
There was more... much more... to Lee's letter, but space constraints and all that, don't you know. However, I figured it was time for a bit of a quibble-fest, particularly since some questions have indeed already been answered, and some are yet to be. TANSTAAFL. Keep those cards, letters, and zero-gee manuals jinking in, and we'll see you in 45! - RP