Allen Steele
40 Quotations from Allen Steele
| AI n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 133 After we get our shoreleave…the AI’s will be minding the ship while it’s parked in orbit, so we can stretch our legs a bit on the ground. |
| airlock n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 40 Since the airlock could accommodate only two people at a time, the two men had allowed Miho to have her privacy while they waited in the depressurised garage. |
| chrononaut n. | 2001 Chronospace 61 Although no one knew what they were, several theories had been advanced to explain the sightings, the most popular being that they themselves were chrononauts, yet from farther up the timestream. |
| cryogenics n. | 1990 Clarke County, Space 73 Biostasis for space travel had been achieved not by cryogenics—dozens of people from the twentieth century were still paying for that mistake—but through psychoactive drugs, clinical derivatives of dioden hystrix, the fungus that Haitian houngan had used for centuries to fake the deaths of men and women, then later revive them and enslave them as zombis, the so-called living dead of modern myth. |
| cyborg n. | 2003 The Madwoman of Shuttlefield in Asimov’s Science Fiction May 70 A Savant: a posthuman who had once been flesh and blood until he’d relinquished his humanity to have his mind downloaded into cyborg form, becoming an immortal intellect. |
| datapad n. | 2010 Emperor of Mars in Asimov’s Science Fiction June 18 He rarely shared a table with anyone else in the wardroom, and instead ate by himself, staring at his datapad the entire time. |
| deflector n. | 2008 Galaxy Blues in Asimov’s Science Fiction Feb. 99 In the blink of an eye, the big freighter was gone, with little more than a last glimpse of its forward deflector array. |
| face plate n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 270 Nash instinctively threw his arms up in front of his helmet to protect his faceplate from being cracked. |
| face plate n. | 2008 Galaxy Blues 102 I still had to use my free hand to clear silt from my faceplate. |
| farside n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 131 I didn’t know myself until about three weeks ago, just before we went around the solar farside. We received some E-mail for you on the Huntsville uplink, and that’s when I was briefed… |
| generation ship n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 198 Even a hypothetical matter-antimatter drive can only attain twenty percent of the speed of light at its maximum velocity, and there is no reason to believe that the Cooties had developed technology of that magnitude. But if they made the journey in a generation-ship or in suspended animation… |
| gravity screen n. | 2001 ChronoSpace 154 ‘I’ve rerouted the gravity subsystem to the negmass, but I can’t access the main bus without... shit!’ The deck buffeted violently as the timeship hit heavy turbulence. Through the headset, Franc heard Hoffman curse as he pitched sideways once more; true to his word, he had cut off the gravity screen. |
| gravity well n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 21 Once having escaped Earth’s gravity well, beyond the orbit of the Moon, the vessels had rendezvous-ed in deep space. |
| groundside adv. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 133 We've still got to refuel at the Phobos fuel depot and check out the boat for the ride home, and seven days groundside is the longest I can stretch it. |
| gyrobus n. | 2007 Galaxy Blues in Asimov’s Science Fiction Dec. 101 We're to pack up and grab the noon gyrobus to New Brighton. |
| hive mind n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 199 Paul has become convinced that the pseudo-Cooties interact as a sort of hive mind, similar to that of terrestrial insects. The most appropriate analogy might be to driver ants. Given their past behavior, I have to agree with his assessment. If the original Cooties, as represented by their automechanical counterparts, are highly evolved insects, then this would seem to make sense. |
| holoscreen n. | 2015 Long Wait in Asimov’s Science Fiction Jan. 73 ‘See, everything the ship tells us about what it’s doing comes to us here.’ Dad shifted me from one knee to another as he pointed to the holoscreen. |
| Homo superior n. | 2012 Alive & Well, A Long Way From Anywhere in Asimov’s Science Fiction July 62 He would have seen the rise of homo superior…and how they came to dominate the outer solar system. |
| hyperspace n. | 2008 Galaxy Blues Jan. 126/1 Your vessel will be provided with the proper coordinates for a hyperspace jaunt that will take you to a system Kasimasta has recently entered. |
| jaunt v. | 1993 Lost in the Shopping Mall in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Oct.–Nov. 81 Bass opened his briefcase and prepared to make the jaunt…. Then he jaunted into the Gallerie Virtual. |
| marsquake n. | 2004 Garcia Narrows Bridge in Asimov’s Science Fiction Jan. 71 There were predictions that it would be destroyed by the first major dust storm or marsquake. |
| moon rocket n. | 2014 V-S Day 86 ‘Before he knew it, every reporter in America wanted to do an interview with him. And they all wanted to know when he was going to build that rocket to the Moon.’ ‘A moon rocket? [...] Why would they think he’s building something like that?’ ‘At the end of the paper, Bob speculated that it might be possible to fire a rocket to the Moon with an explosive charge aboard, to blow up when it crashes there so that astronomers could see it and know that it had arrived.’ |
| nanite n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 315 Raw materials are being fed into the vats,…which in turn are being broken down into their basic elements by the nanites and reassembled into solid-state components for the starship. |
| nanorobot n. | 1990 Clarke County, Space 181 A holographic monitor depicting a diagram of her body’s circulatory system showed the gradual process of the microscopic nanorobots which had been injected into her bloodstream as they moved through her veins and arteries, repairing the breaks in her blood vessels. |
| nanotechnology n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 283 It was made to perform like a human being. And before you ask, it was made by nanotechnology. Alien nanotechnology, far beyond the rudimentary nanites we've developed thus far. |
| posthuman n. | 2003 The Madwoman of Shuttlefield in Asimov’s Science Fiction May 70 A Savant: a posthuman who had once been flesh and blood until he'd relinquished his humanity to have his mind downloaded into cyborg form, becoming an immortal intellect. |
| skinsuit n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 38 They now followed Jessup, all three clad in the lightweight Mylar skinsuits which had recently replaced the more cumbersome hardsuits of the first expeditions. The white fabric overgarments of their skinsuits were soiled with red dust, and every few seconds, short steamy-cold plumes of vapor vented from their backpacks: waste carbon-monoxide, expelled from the open-loop life-support systems which extracted oxygen from the native carbon-dioxide and fed into the skinsuits' zero-prebreath environment. |
| space colony n. | 2008 Galaxy Blues in Asimov’s Science Fiction 99 ‘It’s…very nice, thank you.’ Rain’s voice was low; I could tell she was still trying to wrap her head around finding a Victorian library in an alien space colony. |
| space exploration n. | 1997 Primary Ignition in Absolute Magnitude Fall–Winter 11/2 Space exploration is not about going to Mars. Space exploration is about permanently establishing humankind as a spacefaring race. |
| space law n. | 1989 Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Feb. 76 (editorial caption for Allen M. Steele’s ‘Free Beer & the William Casey Society’) The speaker…—a well-known attorney in space law—casually mentioned that the space shuttle could carry 2000 gallons of beer into orbit. |
| space liner n. | 1990 Clarke County, Space 58 TexSpace SSTO shuttle Lone Star Clipper was a few minutes from initiating the OMS burn which would brake the spaceliner for its primary approach to Clarke County, when the bridge crew received a priority transmission, relayed by TDRS comsats, from Washington D.C. |
| space station n. | 1990 Clarke County, Space 26 Essentially a Bernal sphere, surrounded at each end by torus clusters arrayed along axial shafts, solar vanes and giant mirrors, Clarke Country is the largest space station ever successfully built. |
| starship n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 72 Although a starship has never been found, circumstantial evidence suggests that it was dismantled and that the Cooties did not leave our Solar System again. |
| stunner n. | 2007 Galaxy Blues in Asimov’s Science Fiction Oct.–Nov. 197 I saw that the warrant officer had returned, his right hand resting upon a stunner holstered in his belt. |
| telepath n. | 2008 Galaxy Blues in Asimov’s Science Fiction Feb. 93 A sly smile; Ted didn’t have to be a telepath to know a lie when he heard it. |
| terraform v. | 1988 Live from the Mars Hotel in Asimov’s Science Fiction mid-December 108 Well, it’s no secret that life at Arsia Base was rough. Always will be rough, or at least until someone gets around to terraforming Mars, which is a wild-eyed fantasy if you ask me. |
| viewscreen n. | 1990 Clarke County, Space 44 Macy lay…against the wall of her cabin, distantly watching the window-like viewscreen as Clarke County grew increasingly closer. The shuttle was making a flyby of the colony and the screen was displaying a close-up view of Clarke County as seen from the side. |
| waldo n. | 1992 Labyrinth of Night 194 The semi-robotic machine stood ten feet high and moved on two backward-jointed waldo legs. |
| wallscreen n. | 2015 Long Wait in Asimov’s Science Fiction Jan. 88 I looked up. The wallscreen was logoned to a newsnet, and the first thing I saw was something that looked like a fuzzy little white blob against a black background. |
| worldlet n. | 1990 Clarke County, Space 86—7 Blind Boy Grunt had been haunting Clarke County’s information system for the past year, beginning a few months after the colony began operating as an inhabitated [sic] worldlet. |