Neal Stephenson
See first quotes from Neal Stephenson
15 Quotations from Neal Stephenson
| avatar n. | 1992 Snow Crash (1993) 35 The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro’s avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him just as he’s seeing them. |
| avatar n. | 1992 Snow Crash v. 33 The people are pieces of software called avatars. |
| beam v. | 1992 Snow Crash v. 34 You can’t just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. |
| bionic adj. | 1988 Zodiac . 11 I threw myself on the mercy of Esmerelda, a black librarian of somewhere between ninety and a hundred who contained within her bionic hairdo all knowledge, or the ability to find it. |
| gravity well n. | 2015 Seveneves 510 Endurance was at least as maneuverable now as she had been at the beginning, when she had wallowed at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well, burdened with years’ worth of propellant. |
| materialize v. | 1992 Snow Crash 34 You can’t just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. |
| meatspace n. | 1999 Cryptonomicon (2002) 535 Current meatspace coordinates, hot from the GPS receiver card in my laptop: [etc.]. |
| metaverse n. | 1992 Snow Crash iii. 22 Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. |
| metaverse n. | 1992 Snow Crash iii. 24 Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by-30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes. |
| phaser n. | 1999 Cryptonomicon 102 A beam of yellow light, like a phaser blast in Star Trek, shoots across the bay. |
| planet-wide adj. | 1992 Snow Crash xlviii. 328 A fundamental rebuilding of the whole Metaverse, carried out on a planetwide, corporate level. |
| pseudogravity n. | 2008 Anathem 674 We assumed that, inside of the icosahedron, some part of it rotated to create pseudo-gravity. |
| Sirian adj. | 1984 Big U (2001) 231 After Dex Fresser had consumed sixteen hits of acid (his supplier had never really grasped the idea of powers of two), five bong-loads of hashish rolled in mescaline, a square of peyote Jell-O, a lude, four tracks, a small handful of street-legal caffeine pep pills, twelve tablespoons of cough syrup, half a can of generic light wine and a pack of Gaulois cigarettes [...] Dex spazzed out to the max. All became quiet as the propulsion reactors of a passing Sirian space cruiser damped out his stereo (the DJ had turned down the volume), and all heard Dex announce that at midnight Big Wheel would say something very important to him. |
| space warp n. | 1988 Zodiac . 3 There was at least an acre back here, tucked away in kind of a space warp caused by Brighton’s irrational street pattern. |
| Tolkienian adj. | 1999 Cryptonomicon 647 These guys only think about one thing: the cards in their hands, each contained in a clear plastic sleeve to keep it mint condition, each decorated with a picture of a troll or wizard or some other leaf on the post-Tolkienian evolutionary tree, and printed on the back with elaborate rules. |