Close to Critical by Hal Clement (Corgi Books)
Close to Critical was first published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1958, and in book form by Ballantine in July 1964, with cover art by Paul Lehr. The image shown here is Corgi’s 1968 UK paperback edition. From the back cover:
It was a liquid planet. It steamed. And melted. And hardened again into changing shapes and moving mountains. Ships could not land there. The boosters were useless against a pressure eight hundred times that of earth. Metal dissolved in a few moments to a pool of slime. The inhabitants were scale-armoured creatures weighing over a ton. And when two children, one human, one alien, were lost in an experimental bathyscaphe on the surface of the planet, their rescue presented a formidable and terrifying task …
The letterforms of Mania are melting, too. Cheee, a contemporary typeface design by James Edmondson, was recently updated to include a variable font with two axes, “Yeast” and “Gravity” (named by Frank Grießhammer). On Nick Sherman’s v-fonts.com, you can play around with the axes to approximate Mania. Do you think we can talk James into adding a “Temperature” axis? After all, he likes his fonts drippin’!
For comparison: Cheee v1.3 from Future Fonts, with relatively high (but not max) values for yeast and gravity.
1 Comment on “Close to Critical by Hal Clement (Corgi Books)”
James has picked up the idea and ran with it: Less than a month after I made this stupid request, Cheee has been extended by a temperature axis and is now melting, oozing and dripping! I’m flabbergasted and grateful. Version 1.4 came out just in time for Halloween. You can preview it on v-fonts.com and license it from Future Fonts.