Her excuses are not that she was invited to a royal wedding, or to hobknob with some of FIFA's now discredited senior citizens who promised to vote for England's prospects in staging a far-off World Cup.
Perhaps because we know this far-off world so well — and because he is largely so true to it — Mr. Pullman's occasional attempts to inject modern notes are jarring.
The nineteen-twenties appeared, to Miller, apolitical: "Quite a lot was going on all over that far-off world, but it didn't affect us because we didn't know about it.
In 1988, Nicole Yorkin of the Los Angeles Times interviewed 30 futurologists for a piece looking ahead to "a cold, sunny spring morning in April 2013", imagining the life of the fictional Morrow family in the far-off world of 21st-century LA.
The title, from Baudelaire, speaks of "a far-off world, absent, almost dead," and indeed, this music's pursuit of sensuous beauty as pure art is distinct from the musical violence and depression of so many of Henri Dutilleux's 20th-century colleagues.
Well-executed experiences completely surround the audience, with no bezels or screen borders to remind them they aren't actually in some far-off world.
How's this for an implausible premise for a novel: Sci-Fi author Neal Stephenson's latest book, Anathem, revolves around cloistered groups of nerds who live in a far-off world and think long term--really long term.
The spacecraft's initials, NH, were another reason Nix and Hydra received the names they did, just as the first two letters of Pluto honor Percival Lowell, the astronomer who searched for the far-off world but died 14 years before Clyde Tombaugh, working at Lowell Observatory, ultimately succeeded in finding it.
Odds are we won't be able to travel to far-off world using currently available engines, so if we're serious about getting off this planet let's not forget Stephen Hawking's warning we're going to have to seriously think about bigger, more powerful engines.
"I am moved, as I know everyone else is, looking at these exquisite images of Dione's surface and crescent, and knowing that they are the last we will see of this far-off world for a very long time to come," Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a news release.
