Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 396

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Anomaly: A Novel," by Hervé Le Tellier.

Strapped into his seat, Markle pushes both General Electric throttles to the maximum, because damn, what is this bastard! I mean, you might expect doldrums like that on a Rio–Madrid, near the equator, but what the hell’s it doing right up in the North Atlantic? Fuck, this is crazy, we have the most powerful engines around and fantastically supple wings, we can’t just snap in two like some scale model, it’s not possible. We got out of fixes dozens of times on the simulators, with engine failures, depressurizations, onboard computers dying on us…shit, we can’t screw it up in real life. Markle doesn’t think about his kids, or his wife, not yet, it may even be that pilots always die before they have time to watch their life flash before their eyes, and Markle is definitely not thinking of the passengers; right now, he’s just trying to save this big, very heavy, and very clumsy Boeing, so he goes through procedures he’s learned by heart and repeated over and over; he puts his faith in reflexes and his twenty years of experience. But it’s still a hell of a thing.

“Do you think you felt the exact moment of what some people are calling ‘divergence,’ or more recently the ‘anomaly’?” 

“Of course, like everyone else on the plane. The turbulence stopped and the sun came streaming into the cabin. That last sentence is also the definition of Prozac.”