[FPSPACE] Re: Xena? XENA?

[Robert G Kennedy III]

At 8:51 PM -0400 8/1/5, DSFPortree at aol.com wrote:
>I just bumbled across "Proserpine" in Blish's CITIES IN FLIGHT. Not sure
>if that's a typo - there are a few in the Overlook Press edition. Anyway,
>assuming that Proserpine is a valid variant, is it already taken?

Not a typo. There is a small city is Queensland, Australia, or perhaps the
Northern Territories called Proserpine with an "e", which my wife, who is
half-Australian, insists on pronouncing "pross - er - PINE". I'm not aware
of a single other habitation in Australia of any size named for a classical
deity, however the three biggest cities (Sydney, Victoria, Adelaide)
containing ~50% of the total population are all named after firstnames of
female British royalty.

Since the Blish series is about flying cities, as its title would suggest,
in which the spacefaring cities made their living by performing migrant
industrial labor after abandoning old Earth via "spindizzy" antigravity
drives, I'd guess the mention of Proserpine has to do with the preexisting
Australian city, and not classical mythology.


--
Robert Kennedy, PE
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