Where were you, Hawaii?
While laid up from the remnants of some sort of flu/cold/nasty-icky-thing-that-makes-you-throw-up I decided to catch up on some reading from my Tome of Arthur C. Clarke.1 It has every of his published short stories in chronological order. One amusing thing I noticed was that during World War II, his stories were excessively dark and often involved humans or aliens destroying themselves or other races. As the years progressed into the late '50s they became much more bizarre and whimsical. But today I ran into this and it utterly confused me:
Any of you who are familiar with domestic American affairs may know that Florida's claim to be the Sunshine State is strongly disputed by some of the other forty-seven members of the Union.
Forty-seven? That would imply forty-eight states. As much as Clarke is not American, I figured he would be able to notice a simple fact such as that. But then I remembered that the story was written in 1957 and Alaska and Hawaii were added to the Union in 1959. Strange, the things time does to literature.
1: It is actually called The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.
Any of you who are familiar with domestic American affairs may know that Florida's claim to be the Sunshine State is strongly disputed by some of the other forty-seven members of the Union.
Forty-seven? That would imply forty-eight states. As much as Clarke is not American, I figured he would be able to notice a simple fact such as that. But then I remembered that the story was written in 1957 and Alaska and Hawaii were added to the Union in 1959. Strange, the things time does to literature.
1: It is actually called The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.