John M. Ford
7 Quotations from John M. Ford
| credit n. | 1987 How Much For Just the Planet? 8 ‘I admit that the Deployable Target is a very fancy rubber balloon,’ Kirk said, ‘not to mention expensive—’ ‘Two point eight six three million credits for each of the four prototypes,’ Spock said. |
| gravity well n. | 1987 How Much for Just the Planet? 36 They’re headed straight for the surface… Any deeper in the gravity well and the tractors won’t be reliable. |
| group mind n. | 1990 Fugue State 114 For the innocent in our torture chamber, the experience is one of confusion and injustice. For the stoic, it is a mere distraction from his contemplations. The revolutionary finds a means to an end, the sadomasochist pleasure, the spy the price of doing business, the double-agent a sense of getting the job done. The same limbs are twisted in the same ways, but the experiences being fed to the collective are all different. And what is modifying the inputs to the collective but the collective itself, through those extensions of itself resident in the access units? The group mind is reinforcing itself, memory telling mind what to remember. |
| ion gun n. | 1979 Stone Crucible in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Aug. 62 Ye canna shoot me with an ion-gun. |
| space lane n. | 1980 On Playing Rôles: Third Look in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 51 If they players would rather explore one world in detail than flit among a hundred, build one without a starport, far off the space lanes. |
| superheroine n. | 1979 Mandalay in Asimov’s Science Fiction Oct. 45 At the head of the column stood a woman in black, a superheroine who kept some of her powers, Charlie Brunner. (Charlene? Charlotte? Maybe before the Fracture. But here, Charlie.) |
| Tau Cetan n. | 1979 Adventure of Solitary Engineer in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Sept. 118 ‘Watson, you see, but you do not—oh, forget it. Indeed it is a bottle, Watson; a bottle that once held Chateau Ganymede ’86, fermented from subsurface fungi on Jupiter’s moon, a vile concoction. I keep mine in a radioactive-ash-scuttle. There is your murderer.’ ‘You mean Bruce Dee was drunk.’ ‘As the proverbial Tau Cetan, Watson.’ |