Alastair Reynolds

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Alastair Reynolds

18 Quotations from Alastair Reynolds

avian n. 2002 A. Reynolds Redemption Ark 358 The overseer looked on the extent of its works around Delta Pavonis. It knew of the previous cleansing, the wiping out of the avians who had last inhabited this local sector of space.
cyborgization n. 2001 A. Reynolds Chasm City 48 The Chimerics in general had taken cyborgisation to new extremes, blending themselves and their animals with machines.
cyborgized adj. 2000 A. Reynolds Revelation Space xviii. 290 Hegazi had always been an extreme example of his kind—almost as comprehensively cyborgised as his Captain…
generation ship n. 2001 A. Reynolds Chasm City 161 Sky’s Edge, of course, was another case entirely. It was the only world that had ever been settled by generation ship. There were some mistakes you didn’t make twice.
graser n. 2000 A. Reynolds Revelation Space 547 The first graser burst had hit the nose of the shuttle thirty seconds after the tactical attack siren had begun to shriek; barely enough time to throw off a cloud of ablative chaff, designed to dissipate the intital energies of the incoming gamma-ray photons.
graser n. 2002 A. Reynolds Redemption Ark xxv. 369 The yields were about one hundredth of a crustbuster burst, which was sufficient to power a particle beam or graser with a five-light-second kill range.
hive mind n. 2002 A. Reynolds Redemption Ark 25 Then, just when she had almost been turned into a spider, had almost had her own memories erased and been pumped full of the implants that would bind her into their hive mind, the zombies arrived.
kiloyear n. 2000 A. Reynolds Hideaway in Interzone (#157) July 7 Tens of kiloyears ago, long before the Waymakers, even before the Flourishing.
laser rifle n. 2001 A. Reynolds Chasm City xx. 307 Swearing, I opened the door on my side, jogged round to the back of the vehicle and unracked a laser-rifle for myself.
light-hour n. 2000 A. Reynolds Revelation Space (2001) 354 It was dark, too: Delta Pavonis was ten light-hours away, and the other nearby star—Hades—offered almost no light at all.
light sail n. 2002 A. Reynolds Redemption Ark 391 He had started turning Skade’s light-sails to his own side, training his own optical lasers on them as they passed in the night and steering them into the paths of the chasing ships.
neutronium n. 2000 A. Reynolds Revelation Space xxviii. 376 The relativistic projectile weapons were only slightly tardier, and reports of their success followed a few seconds later; spectacular stuttering pulses as the projectiles rained home, slugs of neutronium and antimatter slamming into the world.
Plutonian adj. 2000 A. Reynolds Revelation Space xix. 302 Then came two smaller sub-Jovian gas worlds, hardly giants at all, then a Plutonian world—not much more than a captured cometary husk, with two attendant moons.
ramscoop n. 1999 A. Reynolds Galactic North in G. Dozois Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 13 (2000) 92 The ramscoops gasped at interstellar gas, sucking lone atoms of cosmic hydrogen from cubic metres of vacuum.
sentience n. 1 2000 A. Reynolds Revelation Space (2001) 448 They might have been alien in their biology, inspiring a kind of visceral revulsion simply because they were so far from what the human mind considered the right and proper form for sentience.
sentient adj. 2000 A. Reynolds Revelation Space (2001) 437 It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.
spacefarer n. 2000 A. Reynolds Revelation Space xii. 201 Unrestricted, any of these spacefarers could have dominated the entire galaxy in the totally inconsequential time of a few tens of millions of years.
xenocide n. 2002 A. Reynolds Redemption Ark (2004) 22 But what she sensed was an aeons-old litany of surgical xenocide; of a dreadful process of cleansing waged upon emergent sentient species.