George Zebrowski
28 Quotations from George Zebrowski
| artificial intelligence n. | 1977 Books in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Aug. 76/1 The ‘mortal engines’ [in the Stanislaw Lem collection Mortal Engines] refer to artificial intelligences which…must be regarded as conscious beings after a certain level of development is reached; to program them is slavery, to destroy them is murder. |
| big dumb object n. | 1998 Afterword in C. Pellegrino & G. Zebrowski Star Trek: Next Generation: Dyson Sphere (1999) 200 The history of science fiction is filled with large structures; but it is a mistake to consider them as mere genre conceits, ‘big dumb objects’, as some have called them, growing out of the desire to have purely fictional dramatic extravagances. |
| commlink n. | 1999 Star Trek Next Generation: Dyson Sphere ii. 43 ‘Lock closing, now,’ Data called from the Enterprise ’s comlink. |
| Dyson sphere n. | 1998 Afterword in C. Pellegrino & G. Zebrowski Star Trek: Next Generation: Dyson Sphere (1999) 201 One must think about the physical possibilities of a Dyson Sphere habitat, to the point where one can see the implications for life on the inner surface. |
| Dyson sphere n. | 1998 Star Trek Next Generation: Dyson Sphere xii. 189 For the first time, the Dyson sphere really did look like a planet. It was as small as Earth now, and growing smaller with each passing second. The instruments suggested that it did not exist at all, except visually. |
| earthborn n. | 1984 Ashes and Stars in Omega Point Trilogy 12 If he could hurt even ten Earthborn, the news would humiliate millions; the dead deserved that much. |
| ether ship n. | 1990 Lenin in Odessa in Alternate Heroes i. 329 He was fascinated, for example, by the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the aether wind, which was predicted on the basis of the idea of the earth’s motion through a stationary medium. When this detection failed, Reilly wrote a letter to a scientific journal (supplied to me by one of my intellectual operatives in London) insisting that the aether was too subtle a substance to register on current instruments. One day, he claimed, aether ships would move between the worlds. |
| 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. |
| Homo superior n. | 1991 Stranger Suns 279 Into a being that will continue to change. Not instant homo superior, but with small steps over a long period of time. |
| in-system adj. | 1977 Ashes & Stars 7 A hundred thousand worlds circle their suns here, many of them earth-like; others are too young for intelligent life to have developed; some cradle pre-space humanoid cultures; still others have in-system space travel; many are dead worlds. |
| jumpship n. | 1991 Stranger Suns 130 The first jump ships needed even more energy, but they gave the alien engineers the capacity to enter otherspace, and hence to invade the cores of suns and harness their power, transmitting along foreshortened lines to ships which could now go anywhere and never lack for fuel. |
| jumpspace n. | 1977 Ashes & Stars 27 His skin was growing pale here, as if the few days had really been years. What was time in jumpspace? |
| Klingon n. | 1999 Star Trek Next Generation: Dyson Sphere ii. 29 The natural universe, as every Klingon knew, was itself a fearful antagonist. |
| normal space n. | 1991 Stranger Suns 130 As the ship left the station, we saw the same sun again in jumpspace and in normal space. |
| otherspace n. | 1991 Stranger Suns in Amazing Stories Mar. 119 Juan tensed, expecting the shift into otherspace. |
| prespace adj. | 1977 Ashes & Stars 7 A hundred thousand worlds circle their suns here, many of them earth-like; others are too young for intelligent life to have developed; some cradle pre-space humanoid cultures; still others have in-system space travel; many are dead worlds. |
| pre-spaceflight adj. | 1972 Omega Point 16 He is fond of citing vast amounts of earth history, mostly pre-spaceflight and solar system bound, to support his views which have gained some influence in recent years. |
| shuttle n. | 1999 Star Trek Next Generation: Dyson Sphere iv. 66 He managed it after two tries, and in a few minutes was ascending through low gravity, into the brightly lit shuttle compartment. |
| shuttlecraft n. | 1999 Dyson Sphere (Star Trek: Next Generation) iii. 52 The interior of the shuttlecraft Balboa had seats suitable for humanoids as well as saddles for Hortas. |
| solar system n. | 1977 Ashes & Stars 109 Gorgias touched the map retrieval plate and the screen lit up, revealing a solar system of twelve planets. |
| solar system n. | 1991 Stranger Suns 38 ‘We’re the first human beings to reach another solar system,’ Lena said with awe. |
| space travel n. | 1999 Star Trek Next Generation: Dyson Sphere ix. 136 ‘And what was this hope?’… ‘Space travel. It’s an ancient dream for them.’ |
| star system n. | 1977 Ashes & Stars 115 From the scattered Herculeans still alive on more than a dozen star systems, besides those on Myraa’s World, I've learned that the Whisper Ship is probably manned by an officer named Gorgias and his son of the same name. |
| subspace n. | 1999 Star Trek Next Generation: Dyson Sphere i. 3 The Federation had restricted their exploration of the Sphere entirely to surface mapping and long-range subspace scans. |
| tractor n. | 1999 Star Trek Next Generation: Dyson Sphere ix. 139 Riker had a plan for beaming clusters of pulse engines into the holds of the shuttles…strapping tractor devices to their hulls, and sending them into Dyson uncrewed. |
| transhumanity n. | 1991 Stranger Suns 293 He imagined his colony of ever-changing trans-humanity, each generation reaching deeper into the beast to clear away evolution’s stubborn residues, and himself wandering across the colony’s variants, an estranged Moses crossing and recrossing the river Jordan, always hearing something different on a changing Sinai. |
| warp n. | 1999 Star Trek Next Generation: Dyson Sphere i. 9 No dust particles glowed and scratched warp trails on the bridgescreen. |
| worldlet n. | 1999 Star Trek Next Generation: Dyson Sphere ix. 145 The worldlet wobbled and cracked… After more than two hours, it was still flinging sparks and hot coals from the wound. |