Stephen Baxter
20 Quotations from Stephen Baxter
| adamantium n. | 2012 Long Earth xlviii. 321 The ultimate ‘black box’, you might say, is in the belly of the ship, armoured in an alloy that I confidently believe makes adamantium look like putty and will, I am sure, remain totally unscathed even in the event of a meteor strike of mass-extinction proportions. |
| anti-gravitational adj. | 2002 Dreaming Mould in Resplendent (2006) 253 At least the ground was level, more or less. And Stub, on his improvised stretcher, wasn’t as heavy as he should have been. Evidently the smart med-care cloak contained some anti-gravitational trickery. |
| ant-man n. | 1995 Ant-Men of Tibet in Interzone May 11 The nearest Ant-Man took a single, angular step towards me. He was perhaps five feet all. His legs were so thin they were more like bare bones, I thought, than fleshy limbs. His body seemed segmented…. His head was a sort of pear-shape. |
| astronavigation n. | 2013 Proxima lxxxiv. 435 You know, I worked in astronavigation. On a starship, for God’s sake. But we never drove a hulk ship across the solar system. |
| bot n. | 1994 Ring (1996) . 213 The craft from within the ice, dug up and splayed out against the surface by a team of autonomous 'bots, was like a bird, with night-dark wings a hundred yards long trailing back from a small central body. |
| Earthish n. | 2015 Endurance 92 She grinned, showing good teeth, and said something in a liquid dialect that Stillich’s systems began to translate for him. He waved that away. ‘Speak Earthish,’ he snapped. |
| flitter n. | 1994 Ring (1996) 43 The flitter tumbled from the shimmering throat of the wormhole transit route from Port Sol to Earthport. Louise Ye Armonk peered out of the cramped cabin, looking for Earth. Mark sat beside her, a bookslate on his lap. |
| gateway n. | 1991 Baryonic Lords in Interzone (#49) July 6/1 Jim Bolder, who piloted a stolen Xeelee nightship to the site of their greatest single artifact: the Ring, that monstrous torus whose mass had ripped open a gateway to another universe. |
| home galaxy n. | 2004 Mayflower II in Resplendent v. 437 These two had come from the home Galaxy—from sol system itself, they said. |
| hyperdrive n. | 1994 Ring (1996) . 65 However the hyperdrive works, it must be based on manipulating the multidimensionality of space. |
| Jonbar adj. | 2007 Time’s Tapestry in Interzone (#210) June 69/1 (interview) [Howard:] Conqueror is very sfnal in that it gets the reader to ask the question ‘What if...?’ Alternate or stillborn realities seem to be a theme that you can never quite keep way from, so what jonbar hinges are the most important in Time’s Tapestry? [Baxter:] The basic conceit in Time’s Tapestry is that we’re working through historical epochs, each of which is subject to meddling from the then future, our near present. So the whole thing is full of jonbar hinges. |
| light barrier n. 2 | 2014 Ultima xvi. 126 Here, you had no relativity theory. But you did have the kernels, and you discovered relativity experimentally, by driving your kernel ships up against the light barrier, and finding out the hard way that the clocks slow and the relativistic mass piles up. |
| megayear n. | 1994 Ring (1996) . 80 Sam wants to go to Tau Ceti and build houses under the light of a new sun; the dark possibilities of five megayears hence couldn’t be of less interest to him. |
| nanobot n. | 1994 Ring (1996) . 23 She subvocalized a command to send nanobots scouring through her bloodstream; she sobered up fast, with a brief shudder. |
| nanomachine n. | 1994 Ring (1996) . 388, I think they downloaded equipment into there: nanomachines, ‘bots of some kind—maybe even some analogue of humans. |
| planetary engineering n. | 2013 Proxima x. 54 Yes, he had needed some big-scale equipment, but even though he had reused a solar-power station, itself a much-hated relic of the past Heroic age with its hubristic planetary engineering schemes, he would use energies of orders of magnitude less than those that had hurled Dexter Cole to Proxima. |
| space science n. | 2013 Wheel of Ice 74 ‘I take it yer studied space science.’ ‘Yes. In the City, I was a pure maths major, and went on to astrophysics and astrometry.’ |
| space-tanned adj. | 1990 Journey to the King Planet in Traces (1998) 85 Captain Roberts was tall and resplendent in his Cunard dress uniform, and his space-tanned face, shielded from the polar breeze by a mass of black beard, creased into a professional smile. |
| star lane n. | 2015 Endurance 218 It had moved several times since its formation, embedded hyperdrive engines lifting the whole shebang across light years, always moving further from the Earth, off along the star lanes of the spiral arm. |
| wormhole n. | 1994 Ring (1996) 43 The flitter tumbled from the shimmering throat of the wormhole transit route from Port Sol to Earthport. Louise Ye Armonk peered out of the cramped cabin, looking for Earth. Mark sat beside her, a bookslate on his lap. |