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The Pentagon War: Difference between revisions
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[[File:pentagon_2_9639.png|frame|Probably not [[The Pentagon]] you had in mind.]]
''The Pentagon War'' is a hard [[Science Fiction]] novel, still in progress,{{when}} that had its start over three decades ago.
In 1980, at the tender age of 15, [[Tropers/Tracer|this troper]] thought, "Why do wars always have ''two'' sides fighting each other? Why not a war with, say, ''five'' sides?". So saying, I hauled out my dad's mechanical typewriter and banged out a [http://www.rogermwilcox.com/stories/pentagon_1980.html 40-page story] in which I tried to describe a "realistic" space war between five star systems. Since hyperspace corridors connected each of the five systems to its two closest neighbors, forming a crude pentagon shape in space, I called this story ''The Pentagon War''.
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* [[Interspecies Romance]]: Sort of. Centaurians in heat can be quite ... passionate ... when they hear their species' mating call. Unlike the Centaurian language, the mating call is simple and gutteral enough that humans can imitate it. Ken Tractor discovered the consequences of making this sound casually....
* [[In Working Order]]: At their second "meeting", 14 years after [[First Contact]], the people defending Earth damaged one Centaurian spacecraft badly enough that the crew had to abandon it in orbit. Human engineers nevertheless managed to salvage their nuclear fusion engine and reverse-engineer the secrets of the Quantum Confinement & Constriction (QC&C) field from it.
* [["It" Is Dehumanizing]]: Then again, the simultaneously-male-and-female Centaurians aren't human, and most of them wouldn't want to ''be'' human.
* [[Jet Pack]]: Sort of. In chapter 2, Arnold Hasselberg wears a space suit equipped with maneuvering thrusters. With very badly positioned controls.
* [[Johann Sebastian Bach]]: While waiting in line for the Sirius/Human-Centauri hyper hole, James Carter plays [http://www.rogermwilcox.com/Pentagon/Wir%20Eilen.mid "Wir Eilen Mit Schwachen"] from Cantata #78 to pass the time.
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