Mark Brandon is a character in Isaac Asimov's science-fiction short stories "Marooned off Vesta" and "Anniversary".
About Mark[]
Mark Brandon is one of the three survivors of the wreck of the commercial starliner Silver Queen after the ship is disabled by meteoroid impacts in the asteroid belt. The three survivors are Mark Brandon, Warren Moore, and Michael (Mike) Shea. The wreckage, or the intact compartment in which they shelter, is left in orbit about the asteroid 4 Vesta.
the survivors have limited life-support supplies: three airtight compartments, one spacesuit, about three days’ worth of air, roughly one week of food, and about a year’s supply of water. Faced with certain suffocation and no conventional motive power, Brandon proposes and executes a plan to use the ship’s abundant water as reaction mass: by opening/perforating the water tank so that a directed jet of water escapes, the resulting reaction thrust alters their trajectory and allows them to descend to Vesta, where a small human population exists and they are able to reach safety. These details are explicit in the original text and in standard summaries of the story.
Twenty years later, Brandon is reunited with Moore and Shea. The sequel revisits the three survivors, involves Moore’s Multivac terminal, and turns on the discovery of a device from the Silver Queen, an "anopticon", that reawakens public interest in their story
Appearances[]
Trivia[]
- "Marooned off Vesta" (1939) was the first professional short story that Asimov sold and was published in Amazing Stories magazine. Its follow-up, "Anniversary" (1959), was specifically written to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Asimov's first publication.