History
Nothing is known of the pre-history of Mercury before the arrival of the Terrans. There is evidence of an ancient, long-lived race of silicon-based life-forms, but their day had passed long before the Terrans came (Shannach-The Last). The only intelligent forms of life found on Mercury were small furred humanoids, who lived a Stone-Age existence among the rocks of the Twilight Belt by hunting the rock-lizard.
The Terrans who came to Mercury were primarily involved in exploiting Mercury's rich mineral resources under the auspices of various companies, such as Mercury Metals and Mining and the similarly named (if not identical) Mercurian Metals. Few of them were adequately prepared for the rigors of the life; the brutal climate of Mercury, its swings between heat and cold, its electrical storms, and its severe exposure to solar radiation caused a terrible mortality. Terro-Mercurians tend to have ebony-black skin and dark hair, by which they can generally be recognized throughout the Solar System (Shadow over Mars; Queen of the Martian Catacombs).
Read more about this topic: Mercury In The Fiction Of Leigh Brackett
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)