Gregory Benford
41 Quotations from Gregory Benford
| astroengineering n. | 1986 Heart of Comet (1987) i. 70 He had applied to Berkeley for graduate school in astroengineering. |
| astroengineering n. | 2014 Shipstar 131 Karl hadn’t thought this way. Engineers don’t, he mused, and then recalled that his three degrees were in electric, mechanical, and astroengineering. |
| Belter n. | 1979 Dark Sanctuary in Omni May 105/2 Belters aren’t scientists. They’re gamblers, idealists, thieves, crazies, malcontents. Most of us are from the cylinder worlds orbiting Earth. |
| bot n. | 1977 Homemaker in Cosmos Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine May 25/1 ‘What’s your name, little bot?’ The robot squats mutely. ‘Bot?’ Gerald asks. ‘Slang for robot. You ask him.’ |
| cold sleeper n. | 1994 Trojan Cat in L. Niven et al. Man-Kzin Wars VI . 288 Feynmann had been designed to run nearly automatically. Crew of three to five, carrying well over three hundred coldsleepers, with a sizable cargo bay. |
| construct n. | 1980 Find the Changeling iv. 79 The woman was an Alvean. Despite her broad hips, loose breasts, and thick pouting lips, she was a construct, a pseudo-human, a creature designed for life on this alien world. |
| dirtside adv. | 1986 Heart of Comet 90 Probably too late for me, though. I'll have to go live on Earth to have my babies, and no male spacer will give up the Black to stay dirtside with me. |
| Earth-norm adj. | 1983 Against Infinity—II in Amazing Stories 130 In the fourteen percent Earth-norm gravity even he could lift and manhandle huge crates. |
| earthshine n. | 2002 Clear Blue Seas of Luna in Year’s Best Science Fiction 20 (2003) 324 Centuries ago, I wanted to go swimming in the clear blue seas of Luna, I remember. Tropical waters at the equator, under Earthshine... What joy it had been, to fertilize those early, still waters with minutely programmed bacteria, stir and season their primordial soup—and wait. |
| Earthside n. | 2005 Sunborn II. vi. 123 When Proserpina had first arrived, Earthside openly doubted the images they sent back. Clouds? Open bodies of liquid? Impossible…. |
| Earthside adj. | 1989 in G. Dozois Isaac Asimov’s Mars (1991) 89 Earthside studies showed that a brief Eden might have flourished for a while. |
| Earthside adj. | 2005 Sunborn I. iii. 24 The aging Earthside population in the advanced nations had driven a huge industry devoted to prolonging life spans, and their diagnostics now had great predictive value. |
| Earthside adv. | 2005 Sunborn I. v. 63 The collision between global climate change and rising energy demands was the biggest international issue Earthside. |
| Earthsider n. | 1983 Against Infinity in Amazing Stories May 116 The Settlement will have to mortgage out to the Luna brokers first, and then some Earthsiders later. |
| generation starship n. | 2000 A Scientist's Notebook: Skylife in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Feb. 110/2 Don Wilcox’s ‘The Voyage that Lasted Six Hundred Years’ (1940) introduced the idea of using generation starships to reach the stars, in the form that was to be often imitated, one year before Robert A. Heinlein’s more famous story ‘Universe’ and its forgotten sequel ‘Common Sense’—gritty realistic dramas of travelers aboard a space ark who learn, in the manner of a Copernican-Galilean revolution, that their world is a ship. |
| groundhog n. | 1994 Sleepstory in Matter's End (1996) 59 Even after the human race had moved into the near-Earth orbits, scattering their spindly factories and cylinder-cities and rock-hopping entrepreneurs, the human race was dominated by nay-saying groundhogs. |
| home star n. | 1974 If the Stars are Gods in T. Carr Universe 4 129 Among the stars of the universe, his place is not great, but as our home star, we must revere him. |
| insectoid adj. | 1986 in Asimov’s Science Fiction Feb. 26 The tour agency said…you hardly noticed them, they deliberately blended in so well. How a seven-foot insectoid thing with gleaming russet skin can look like an Egyptian I don’t know. |
| light-day n. | 1971 Star Crossing in Worlds of If Mar. 88/2 They can’t use gravity waves, so they have to signal by radio or light and they were about two light-days out then. |
| light-month n. | 1971 Star Crossing in Worlds of If Mar. 121/1 I haven’t heard from the Lone Ranger yet…. Probably tangling with the Dents a light-month away. |
| marsquake n. | 1972 Life on the Margin in Amazing Stories Jan. 108/2 Mars probably has some low level of volcanic activity, as well as Marsquakes. |
| mech n. | 1986 Heart of Comet (1987) i. 3 Had had been tending the construction mechs—robots that were deploying girders. |
| mutie n. | 1983 Against Infinity i. ii. 13 They got another flock in late afternoon, surprising muties in a gully, but then the mutants ran and got in among the regular scooters. |
| nearside n. | 1977 In Ocean of Night 199 Her sled was coasting through a series of connected ellipses, bound for nearside. Earth was rising, a glinting crystal globe above the warped moon. |
| neural adj. | 1986 Heart of Comet (1987) i. 10 Tapped into channels through a direct neural link and wrist servos, she scarcely moved. |
| problem story n. | 1984 Hard Science Fiction in Real World in Science Fiction Review Spring 32/3 There is also a basic rule about SF: It is always easier to see problems than propose solutions. This makes the unforeseen-side-effects story the easiest to write, and the ingenious problem-solving ones much harder. We should expect to see more of the former as arts graduates enter the field, particularly if we ignore that citadel of hard SF, Analog. Hard SF’s central mode is the problem story. |
| prodom n. | 1959 Happy Benford Chatter in Void 18 June 2 But fans have always stressed the fiction aspect of science fiction, and except for a few notable exceptions, prodom has done likewise. |
| ramscoop n. | 1982 Relativistic Effects in In Alien Flesh (1988) 77 Upstream lies the chewing gullet of the ramscoop ship, where the incoming protons are sucked in and where their kinetic power is stolen from them by the electric fields. |
| ramscoop n. | 1995 Sailing Bright Eternity (1996) 17 Dead slow, compared to what’s zipping around here now. A ramscoop, big blue-white tail dead straight, scratched across space. |
| shipmind n. | 2014 Shipstar xvi. 125 He had the shipmind call up readings on this from the ancients available on the ship’s database of all human cultures. |
| slideway n. | 2014 Shipstar xxvii. 214 For many hours they had crawled through some conduits and once had to wade through a sewer to get onto a fast-moving slideway. |
| spacer n. 1 | 1986 Heart of Comet 90 Probably too late for me, though. I'll have to go live on Earth to have my babies, and no male spacer will give up the Black to stay dirtside with me. |
| Tau Cetan adj. | 1971 Sky Color in Natural History Feb. 33/2 The colors we see in our sky—or might see in Tau Ceti I’s sky, were we to go there—stem from a number of different physical effects taking place within the gases of the air. And the color we see depends on our eyes; Tau Cetan eyes might not be adapted for viewing terrestrial skies or human eyes for viewing theirs. The human eye is, after all, a very specialized organ. |
| three-D n. | 1971 West Wind, Falling in T. Carr Universe 1 16 The mammoth 3D mounted on one wall had been scrounged out of spare parts several years after the Zephyr expedition was launched. |
| three-D n. | 1971 West Wind, Falling in T. Carr Universe 1 17 But the 3D tapes he’d seen: people jammed together like dogs in a kennel; food rationed; wars and riots; shades of bleak, shades of gray. |
| tight-beam v. | 1986 Heart of Comet (1987) i. 39 Maybe somebody'll tightbeam stuff back before we return. |
| tin can n. | 1979 Dark Sanctuary in Omni May 52/2 That happens every time the cylinder boys build a new tin can and need to form an ecosystem inside. |
| torch n. | 1979 Dark Sanctuary in Matter's End (1994) 155 The Belt is huge, but the high-burn torch I'd turned loose back there was orders of magnitude more luminous than an ordinary fusion jet. |
| torchship n. | 1986 Heart of Comet 20 When they arrived the first task awaiting the torch ship’s crew was to recover the huge cylinders containing the deep-sleeping majority of the mission crew. There were disadvantages to each style of travel—torch ship or slot tug. |
| vibroknife n. | 1986 Heart of Comet 288 Her mouth went dry as she saw the slim-bladed vibro-knife lying next to the corpse. |
| warp n. | 2013 Man Who Sold the Stars in Hieroglyph (2014) 347 ‘Wait, how the hell did you get here so fast?’ ‘Translight, sir. It’s a relativistic warp effect, been working on it for decades.’ |