Larry Niven
See first quotes from Larry Niven
111 Quotations from Larry Niven
| alien life form n. | 1965 World of Ptavvs in Worlds of Tomorrow Mar. 25/1 If Kzanol had not spent so many years controlling alien life forms, growing used to the feel of alien thoughts, his whole personality would have been drowned. |
| 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. |
| astrogate v. | 2000 Fly-By-Night in Asimov’s Science Fiction Oct.–Nov. 39 When Kzinti acquired hyperdrive, they learned that most cannot astrogate through hyperspace. |
| autodoc n. | 1966 Warriors in Worlds of If Feb. 155/2 To each patient Doctor Davis handed a tiny pink pill from the dispenser slot of the huge autodoc which covered the back wall of the infirmary. |
| autodoc n. | 1965 World of Ptavvs in Worlds of Tomorrow Mar. 48/2 ‘Say, how come I rate a human doctor, anyway?’ ‘What happened to you isn’t programmed into the autodocs.’ |
| beamer n. | 1985 Table Manners in J. Pournelle & J. Baen Far Frontiers 294 Of course I had the beamer and it would kill; but it wouldn’t kill fast. |
| beanstalk n. | 1989 Barsoom Project xxii. 201 Of all these proposed skyhooks, the Beanstalk is the most difficult to build. It must stand the greatest stresses. But the Beanstalk can lift cargo from ground to orbit, and fling them out to the stars, for the cost of the electricity, a few dollars a pound. But that cost is deceptive. The Beanstalk is also the most dangerous of the skyhooks. For if the cable ever snapped— |
| Belter n. | 1966 in Galaxy Magazine Dec. 100/1 Those hotels, and the scattered hotels in the other bubbleworld, served every Belter’s occasional need for an Earthlike environment. |
| Belter n. | 1966 Warriors in Worlds of If Science Fiction Feb. 152/2 You noticed a habit of mine once. I never make gestures. All Belters have that trait. It’s because on a small mining ship you could hit something waving your arms around. |
| Belter n. | 1966 Bordered in Black in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Apr. 127/1 When a Belter stops being neat it’s like suicide. |
| Belter n. | 1965 World of Ptavvs in Worlds of Tomorrow Mar. 56/1 They’ll be armed for us, and a weapon is a weapon…. Belters, they’re always waiting for the first ET. They’ll be armed for bear. |
| BEM n. | 1965 World of Ptavvs in Worlds of Tomorrow Mar. 71/2 I've been ordered not to move by a BEM that doesn’t take No for an answer. |
| biotech n. | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye (1975) xviii. 139 Horace Bury watched the foot-high Moties playing behind the wire screen. ‘Do they bite?’ he asked. ‘They haven’t yet,’ Horvath answered. ‘Not even when the biotechs took blood samples.’ |
| cold sleep n. | 1993 Procrustes in Crashlander (1994) 224 I got hold of a little stealth lander, Fourth War vintage, with a cold sleep box in back for you, Sharrol. |
| con n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 89 A public venue was naturally out of the question; and very few fen owned homes large enough to house even a small con. |
| core n. | 1966 At the Core in Worlds of If Science Fiction Nov. 33/1 But the Core! Ignoring refueling and reprovisioning problems, my old ship could have reached the galaxy’s core in three hundred years. No known species had ever seen the Core! It hid behind layer on layer of tenuous gas and dust clouds. |
| corpsicle n. | 1971 in Galaxy Nov. 52/1 ‘Your newstapers called you people corpsicles… I never understood what the tapes meant.’ ‘It comes from popsicle. Frozen sherbet.’ Corbett had used the word himself before he had became one of them. One of the corpsicles, frozen dead. |
| corpsicle n. | 1973 Defenseless Dead in Long ARM Gil Hamilton (1976) 66 ‘People used to call them corpsicles, frozen dead. Or Homo snapiens. You can imagine what would happen if you dropped them.’ Mr. Restarick did not smile. These people were in his charge, and he took his task seriously. |
| cryosleep n. | 1987 Legacy of Heorot iii. 46 Were there dreams in cryosleep? The neurologists said no, but his memory said yes. |
| cyberpunk n. 1 | 1991 Fallen Angels 89 It’s the ultimate synthesis between science fiction, cyberpunk, and horror. |
| disintegrator n. | 1979 Ringworld Engineers in Galileo July 57/1 Where a disintegrator beam falls, solid matter is rendered suddenly and violently positive. It tears itself into a fog of monatomic particles. |
| Dyson sphere n. | 1970 Ringworld 106 But there’s more to a Dyson sphere than collecting solar power. Say you make the sphere one astronomical unit in radius. You've got to clear out the solar system anyway, so you use all the solar planets in the construction. That gives you a shell of, say, chrome steel a few yards thick. Now you put gravity generators all over the shell. You'd have a surface area a billion times as big as the Earth’s surface. A trillion people could wander all their lives without ever meeting one another. |
| Dyson sphere n. | 1970 Ringworld 105 The Ringworld is a compromise, an engineering compromise between a Dyson sphere and a normal planet. Dyson was one of the ancient natural philosophers, pre-Belt, almost pre-atomic. He pointed out that a civilization is limited by the energy available to it. The way for the human race to use all the energy within its reach, he said, is to build a spherical shell around the sun and trap every ray of sunlight. |
| earthshine n. | 1971 Inconstant Moon in All Myriad Ways (1985) iii. 136 A setting moon always looks tremendous. Tonight it glared at us through the gap of sky beneath the freeway, terribly bright, casting an incredible complexity of lines and shadows. Even the unlighted crescent glowed pearly bright with earthshine. Which told me all I wanted to know about what was happening on the lighted side of Earth. And on the moon? The men of Apollo Nineteen must have died in the first few minutes of nova sunlight. |
| fanac n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 24 That was like Bruce, to evaluate everything, even her personal life, in terms of its utility to the current fanac. |
| fanac n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 74 When Bruce raised this expedition, it sounded like good fanac. |
| fandom n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 86 Chuck Umber had published fandom’s most successful news magazine for more than twenty years, in formats growing steadily more cryptic and secretive for an audience growing gradually smaller. |
| fannish adj. | 1991 Fallen Angels 131 You should see my collection of fannish art. |
| fannishness n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 24 Eventually she had had to watch what she said around him because she couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t denounce her for fannishness to the University. |
| faster-than-light adj. | 1970 Ringworld 106 There wasn’t even a theoretical basis for faster-than-light travel. We never did invent hyperdrive, if you'll recall. We'd never have discovered it by accident, either, because we'd never have thought to do our experiments out beyond the singularity. |
| faster than light adv. | 1966 in If Oct. 17/2 Imagine light falling into a savagely steep gravitational well. It won’t accelerate. Light can’t move faster than light. But it can gain in energy, in frequency. |
| femmefan n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 328 Downstairs in one of the function rooms, he found Dinsby in a circle of femmefans surrounding Gordon. |
| fen n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 19 But why tell me, Bob? I'm fafiated. It’s been years since I've dared associate with fen. |
| fen n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 89 A public venue was naturally out of the question; and very few fen owned homes large enough to house even a small con. |
| filker n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 321 Filkers were gearing up out by the pool; the laughter was louder than the singing. |
| filking n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 27 His fingers fluttered through a few traditional tunes: jigs and reels and such; then he started in one some serious filking. |
| free fall n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 9 Gordon had been born in free fall and thrust was new to him. |
| fugghead n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 357 Niven’s law. No cause is so noble that it won’t attract fuggheads. |
| fuggheaded adj. | 1991 Fallen Angels 357 Some fuggheaded Green Police. |
| future history n. | 1975 Tales of Known Space p. xi Future histories tend to be chaotic. They grow from a common base, from individual stories with common assumptions; but each story must—to be fair to readers—stand by itself. The future history chronicled in the Known Space Series is as chaotic as real history. |
| gafiate v. | 1991 Fallen Angels 23–4 ‘We heard you'd gafiated.’ ‘Fafiated.’ She looked him straight in the eye, daring him to disagree. She hadn’t gotten away from it all; she'd been forced away from it all. |
| gafiate v. | 2011 Moon Maze Game xv. 127 They had once been married, but then one of them had lost interest in gaming, and the relationship had drifted apart. If memory served, it was Maud who had gafiated. |
| gee n. 2 | 1965 in Galaxy Magazine June 179/2 And without the artificial gravity to protect us it would take over years to reach the right velocity. The drive gives us a good one hundred gee in uncluttered space. |
| gengineer v. | 1991 Fallen Angels 363 Those mice are gengineered to produce juvenile growth hormone. |
| grandfather paradox n. | 1971 All the Myriad Ways 111 The Grandfather Paradox is basic to any discussion of time travel… We will call any such interference with the past, especially self-cancelling interference, a Grandfather Paradox. |
| grav n. 2 | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye (1975) iv. xlvii. 447 It’s going to be tough facing three gravs after that dinner. |
| graviton n. | 1990 Madness Has Its Place in L. Niven et al. Man-Kzin Wars III (1992) . 15 A lot of those photos show what’s maybe a graviton generator, maybe not. |
| gravity n. | 1965 World of Ptavvs in Worlds of Tomorrow Mar. 54/1 Two gravities! Twelve hours ago, he would have sneered at himself. Two gravities, lying on his back? He could have done it on his head. But that was twelve hours ago, twelve hours of double weight and throbbing metal and noise and no sleep…. It would be a day and a half before ship weight returned to normal. |
| gravity well n. | 1966 At the Bottom of a Hole in Galaxy Dec. 102/1 Even the ships of Earth use only a little of their fuel getting in and out of their pet gravity well. Most of it gets burned getting them from place to place fast. And Mars is lighter than Earth. |
| gripping hand n. | [1974 Mote in God’s Eye 167 It left the Motie standing comically on vacuum, its big left hand gripping a ring that jutted out from the hull.] |
| gripping hand n. | 1993 Gripping Hand 7 On the one hand, if they shimmy too hard, they may be diseased. On the other, if they don’t shimmy, they haven’t eaten well. On the gripping hand, if they’re too young and healthy they will escape and attempt to eat you. |
| groundside adv. | 1991 Fallen Angels 46 Things wouldn’t behave naturally groundside. |
| holo n. | 1970 Ringworld 31 You may examine the holo Louis Wu is carrying. That is the only information I can give you at this time. |
| holovid n. | 1992 California Voodoo Game vi. 68 When all was said and done, one got points by destroying one’s enemy, but made money by cooperating to make the best holovid possible. |
| hyperdrive n. | 1970 Ringworld 106 There wasn’t even a theoretical basis for faster-than-light travel. We never did invent hyperdrive, if you'll recall. We'd never have discovered it by accident, either, because we'd never have thought to do our experiments out beyond the singularity. |
| in-system adj. | 1968 Slowboat Cargo in Worlds of If Feb. 10/1 The ship began to drag a little, a very little, as the cone scooped up interstellar dust and hydrogen. She was still accelerating. Her insystem tank was idle now, and would be for the next twelve years. Her food would be the thin stuff she scooped out between the stars. |
| jump v. | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye 103 First Jump was routine. The transfer point to Murcheson’s Eye was well located. New Caledonia was a magnificent white point source in the moment before MacArthur Jumped. Then Murcheson’s Eye was a wide red glare the size of a baseball held at arm’s length. |
| laser cannon n. | 1966 Neutron Star in Worlds of If Oct. 17/1 Below me was the length of the fusion tube; to the left, the laser cannon. |
| laser cannon n. | 1971 Fourth Profession in Quark Aug. 209 ‘Jerome Finney…showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.’ ‘That would mean a light-sail! ’ ‘Why the big deal, Frazer? I thought you already knew. ’ ‘No. This is the first I've heard of it. I don’t read the Sunday supplements. ’ Morris was exasperated. ‘But you knew enough to call a laser cannon a launching laser! ’ |
| launching laser n. | 1971 Fourth Profession in 1972 Annual World’s Best SF (1972) 23 You don’t have to depend on sunlight, not if you’re launching from a civilized system. Every civilized system has a moon-based launching laser. By the time the sun is too far away to give the ship a decent push, the beam from the laser cannon is spreading just enough to give the sail a hefty acceleration without vaporizing anything. |
| light n. 1 | 1965 World of Ptavvs in Worlds of Tomorrow Mar. 8/2 At .93 lights…the stars become unrecognizable. |
| light-day n. | 2012 Fate of Worlds viii. 68 A very thin line encircled the bridge: short navy-blue dashes alternating with longer pale blue dashes. The Ringworld. Or, rather, Endurance having exited hyperspace sixty light-days from its destination, the Ringworld as it had appeared sixty days earlier. |
| light sail n. | 1971 in Quark 4 Aug. 208 That’s the solar wind. You get the same problem around any yellow sun. With a light-sail you can get push from the solar wind as well as from light pressure. The trouble is, the solar wind is just stripped hydrogen atoms. Light bounces from a light-sail, but the solar wind just hits the sail and sticks. |
| light sail n. | 1971 Fourth Profession in Quark Aug. 209 ‘Jerome Finney…showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.’ ‘That would mean a light-sail! ’ ‘Why the big deal, Frazer? I thought you already knew. ’ ‘No. This is the first I've heard of it. I don’t read the Sunday supplements. ’ Morris was exasperated. ‘But you knew enough to call a laser cannon a launching laser! ’ |
| light sail n. | 1971 Fourth Profession in Hole in Space (1974) 169 ‘The spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.’ ‘Oh,’ I got it then. ‘That would mean a light sail.’ |
| light sail n. | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye (1976) 48 ‘You knew we were dealing with a light-sail propulsion system, sir?… Sunlight per square centimeter falling on a light sail decreases as the square of the distance from the star. Acceleration varies directly as the sunlight reflected from the sail.’… Renner made another parabola, very like the first, but in blue. ‘The stellar wind can also propel a light sail. Thrust varies about the same way. The important difference is that the stellar wind is atomic nuclei. They stick where they hit the sail. The momentum is transferred directly—and it’s all radial to the sun.’ |
| light sail n. | 1990 Madness Has Its Place in L. Niven et al. Man-Kzin Wars III (1992) . 29 Light-sails are rare in the inner solar system. Between Venus and Mercury there are still light-sail races, an expensive, uncomfortable and dangerous sport… The last refuge of the light-sail is a huge, empty region: the cometary halo, Pluto and beyond. The light-sails are all cargo craft. |
| light-speed n. 2 | 1966 Neutron Star in Worlds of If Oct. 20/1 I might well put the…hull to its toughest test yet: smashing it into a neutron star at half lightspeed. |
| light-week n. | 1973 Protector (1980) 179 We're only a couple of light-weeks out from Sol, and he’s a light-year away, and I think he’s decelerating. |
| needle-beam n. | 1970 Ringworld (1984) 232 Louis clawed the flashlight-laser from his belt, used its green needle beam to free Speaker from his balloons. |
| neofan n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 91 ‘I just dropped in recently.’ A neofan, then. |
| neutronium n. | 1966 Neutron Star in Worlds of If Oct. 18/2 The rocket motor would send the Skydiver crashing into eleven miles of neutronium. |
| null-g n. | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye (1975) iii. xxxi. 316 Null-gee races were a favorite if slightly nonregulation game with midshipmen. |
| offworlder n. | 1967 in If Mar. 81/2 She looked startled. ‘Oh! You're an offworlder… Look, you can’t go around town with an offworldder’s [sic] wallet.’ |
| organlegger n. | 1967 Jigsaw Man in H. Ellison Dangerous Visions 220 If the odds broke right, if the right people came down with the right diseases at the right time, the organlegger might save more lives than he had taken. |
| organlegger n. | 1969 in Galaxy Jan. 142/1 For instant replacement of your ruined digestive system, for a young healthy heart, for a whole liver when you'd ruined yours with alcohol—you had to go to an organlegger. |
| organlegging n. | 1969 Organleggers in Galaxy Jan. 118/1 It involved an organlegging gang, apparently run by a single man, yet big enough to cover half the North American west coast. |
| organlegging n. | 1969 Organleggers in Galaxy Jan. 140/2 The crime of organlegging was the result of thousands of years of medical progress, of millions of lives selflessly dedicated to the ideals of healing the sick. |
| planetography n. | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye (1975) iii. xxvi. 244 The physical features of Mote Prime are of some interest, particularly to ecologists concerned with the effects of intelligent life on planetography. |
| ramscoop n. | 1966 in If Feb. 154/1 It’s a light pressure drive powered by incomplete hydrogen fusion. They use an electromagnetic ramscoop to get their own hydrogen from space. |
| ramscoop n. | 1965 World of Ptavvs in Worlds of Tomorrow Mar. 33/1 The interstellar ramscoop robots had been searching out man-habitable systems for nearly a century. |
| sapient adj. | 1970 Ringworld (1976) 73 Speaker, no sapient being ever interrupts a defense mechanism. |
| sapient adj. | 2003 Ones Who Stay Home in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact Jan. 78/1 Most sapient species can’t travel. They would need life support so extensive that they could not perceive the Universe beyond. |
| scanner n. | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye (1975) i. vi. 59 The forward scanners were operative and recording. |
| scout ship n. | 1967 Soft Weapon in Worlds of If Feb. 9/2 He had come running back to the scout ship, breathless and terrified, screaming, ‘Take off! The planet’s full of monsters!’ |
| sercon n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 92 Chuck laughed. ‘Sercon,’ he explained. ‘Serious and constructive activities.’ |
| sercon adj. | 1991 Fallen Angels 92 You'll find plenty to entertain you. Not every fan activity is sercon. |
| slidewalk n. | 1973 ARM in Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (1976) 117 They'd been found on the Wilshire slidewalk in West Los Angeles around 4:30 A.M. People don’t use the slidewalks that late. They're afraid of organleggers. The bodies could have traveled up to a couple miles before anyone saw them. |
| 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. |
| space v. 2 | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye 485 ‘Curse. And how many Mediator pups when they returned?’ ‘I had four sisters.’ ‘Curse!’ Mediators identified with Masters. They held the usual Master emotions about children. Though sterile from an early age, Ivan was not immune to those emotions; but he knew. The children should have been spaced. |
| space-travelling adj. | 1966 Relic of the Empire in Worlds of If Dec. 80/1 I never heard of a space-traveling race that builds such big things for mere monuments. |
| stasis field n. | 1965 in Worlds of Tomorrow Mar. 12/1 The ship had power, probably, to reach several worlds, but not to slow him down to the speed of any known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol wouldn’t care how hard he hit. |
| suit n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 11 Five times his suit had leaked air while they worked to save Freedom Station. |
| suit phone n. | 1970 Ringworld (1976) ix. 129 They could hear him breathing. Once they heard a startled snarling sound. But he never said a word into the suit phone. He was out there a full half-hour, while the heated thing darkened to near-invisibility. Presently he returned to the Liar. When he entered the lounge, he had their complete and respectful attention. |
| supernova n. | 1965 in Galaxy Magazine June 189/1 It could have left the Main Sequence by going supernova or by suddenly expanding into a red giant, but if it had there wouldn’t be any inner planets. |
| supernova n. | 1974 Mote in God's Eye (1976) 278 For astrophysics, perhaps verra important, Captain. They hae been watching yon supergiant for aye their history as it passed across the Coal Sack. ‘Twill go supernova and then become a black hole—and the Moties say they know when. |
| superpower n. | 1971 Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex in All Myriad Ways (1975) 77 All known forms of kryptonian life have super-powers. |
| teleport n. 2 | 1966 By Mind Alone in Worlds of If June 156/1 ‘The penalty for theft is imprisonment, right? How do you imprison a teleport?’ ‘You don’t. You can’t.’ |
| teleporting n. | 1966 By Mind Alone in Worlds of If June 155/1 ‘Take the car!’ Larsen ordered. ‘Don’t try any more teleporting.’ |
| teleporting adj. | 1966 By Mind Alone in Worlds of If June 151 You'd hear a skinny senior describing the teleporting society in Bester’s The Stars My Destination. |
| temporal paradox n. | 1970 Bird in Hand in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Oct. 124/1 Unless that was a side effect of the paradox. Unless the paradox had chopped away Zeera’s extension cage and left her stranded in the past, or cast off into an alternate world line, or…. There had never been a temporal paradox. [ellipsis in original] |
| terraform v. | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye (1975) i. iv. 33 The middle two planets are inhabited, both terraformed by First Empire scientists after Jasper Murcheson. |
| tesseract n. | 2007 Fleet of Worlds xxvii. 215 Forward patted the tesseract; his fingertips bent oddly as they entered the volume of manipulated space. |
| thruster n. | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye xiv. 113 Whitbread coasted slowly inward. He rode a space-to-space taxi, the cabin a polarized plastic bubble, the short hull studded with ‘thruster clusters’—arrays of attitude jets. |
| thruster n. | 1970 Ringworld (1973) viii. 99 Speaker ran the big fusion motors up to full power. He tilted the flat thruster discs out of the plane of the wing, lining their axes along ship’s aft, and added their thrust to the rockets. The Liar backed into the system blazing like twin suns, decelerating at nearly two hundred gravities. |
| torch drive n. | 1976 Words in Science Fiction in Craft of Science Fiction 182 Simple description. Torch drive, duplicator, flying belt. Dolphins’ hands and telepathically operated tools on tractor treads. |
| tri-D n. | 1966 World of Ptavvs (1977) 46 She leaned forward and turned on the tridee screen in the seat ahead. |
| tri-v n. | 1974 Mote in God’s Eye 448 They have given us a tri-v…and it is obviously what the humans watch. There were spokesmen for many Masters. You saw. |
| trufan n. | 1991 Fallen Angels 89 Without Tremont J. Fielding—3MJ as he was known to all trufans—and his sprawling mansion, Minicon might not have come off at all. |
| Venusian adj. | 1965 Becalmed in Hell in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction July 95/2 It was in the emergency tools locker, the Venus suit that was never supposed to be used. NASA had designed it for use at Venusian ground level. [...] I had watched it being tested in the heat-and-pressure box at Cal Tech, and I knew that the joints stopped moving after five hours, and wouldn't start again until they had been cooled. Now I opened the locker and pulled the suit out by the shoulders and held it in front of me. It seemed to be staring back. |
| xenopsychologist n. | 2005 Breeding Maze in Analog Science Fiction & Fact Sept. 51/2 Hsenshesist Brill is a famous xenopsychologist. Ship law restricts him because he runs uncomfortable experiments on sapient entities, but his lectures rank high. Many will attend when he tells us what he has done on your world. |