Brian Stableford
See first quotes from Brian Stableford
32 Quotations from Brian Stableford
| alternate history n. | 1984 The SF Sub-genres in D. Wingrove Science Fiction Source Book (1984) 51 Essays in alternate history have long been a favorite game among historians, but as respectable intellectuals the historians have been timid in their ventures. SF writers, by contrast, are anything but timid—what they often lack is a sense of historical coherency. |
| alternate world n. | 1979 Alternate World in P. Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 26/1 An alternate world is an image of Earth as it might be, consequent upon some hypothetical alteration of history. Many sf stories use the notion of parallel worlds as a frame in which alternate worlds can be held simultaneously and may even interact with one another. |
| alternative world n. | 1993 Alternate World in J. Clute & P. Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 23/1 An alternate world—some writers and commentators prefer the designation ‘alternative world’ on grammatical grounds—is an account of Earth as it might have become in consequence of some hypothetical alteration in history. |
| artificial intelligence n. | 2006 Plurality of Worlds in Asimov’s Science Fiction Aug. 115 You cannot imagine what a handful of renegade artificial intelligences might do to the prospects of human progress. |
| cyborgization n. | 1994 Les Fleurs du Mal in Asimov’s Science Fiction Oct. 125 He was playing about with brainfeed equipment…. Not just memory boxes or neural stimulators, but mental cyborgization. |
| cyborgization n. | 1979 Cyborgs in P. Nicholls Science Fiction Encyclopedia 151/2 The functional cyborg made his first significant appearance in ‘Scanners Live in Vain’ (1950) by Cordwainer Smith. Here cyborgization is designed for space flight, and this particular theme dominates stories of both functional and adaptive cyborgs. [Ibid.] Cyborgization in connection with space travel involves cyborg-spaceship stories such as [etc.]. |
| cyborgized adj. | 1999 Architects of Emortality 113 Suitskins designed for everyday use were purely organic—even supposedly state-of-the-art sexsuits and commercially augmented VE trippers were only lightly cyborgized—but the suitskin Paul had been wearing was nearly 40 percent inorganic. Fortunately, there was no law specifying the limits of explicit neural cyborgization in artificial constructions. |
| cyborgized adj. | 2000 Fountains of Youth lxx. 304 The highkickers were serious about the possibilities of cyborgization, and there were many among them who felt that if cyborgization was the price they would have to pay to establish authentic Utopias in the ice-palace cities that awaited them on Titan and the Uranian moons, then it was a price well worth paying. There were not quite so many who felt that the work of galactic exploration ought to be the province of cyborgized humans rather than silver-piloted probes, but there were enough of them to force the progress of human-machine hybridization into ever-more-adventurous channels. |
| Earthsider n. | 1972 Halcyon Drift (1974) viii. 64 The shipbuilder was a stubborn man, and he didn’t really know what he was about. He was an Earthsider, not a spaceman. |
| empath n. | 1995 The Creators of Science Fiction: Theodore Sturgeon in Interzone (#93) Mar. 55/1 The novella ‘Need’ (1960) is one of the best of his psi -stories, but it is also one of the most harrowing; here the possession of a superhuman sensitivity becomes an alienating force in its own right, and the self-knowledge which the protagonist gains by virtue of his association with the empath is coldly unflattering. |
| ether ship n. | 2006 Plurality of Worlds in Asimov’s Science Fiction 100 Then affinity took hold of him—or, more accurately, the rising ether-ship slammed into his back, while the affinity that bound him to the Earth fought against the force of the rocket’s explosive levitation, trying with all its might to hold him down. |
| genre fantasy n. | 1996 Third Generation Genre Science Fiction in Science-Fiction Studies Nov. 322 It was, for instance, one of the factors involved in the dramatic displacement of genre sf by genre fantasy, because it is much easier for writers to construct in novelistic detail—and for readers to orientate themselves within—a Secondary World which is a straightforward Earth-clone than it is to create a world which is radically differentiated from our own along any of the axes typical of sf. |
| hard science fiction n. | 1994 The Wrong Tree in Interzone (#88) Oct. 64/1 Its motifs have been plundered by these neighbouring genres to the extent that purists have been forced to designate a special category of ‘hard science fiction’ to distinguish the sf which aims for some kind of extrapolative rigour from that which simply uses the imagery of sf as window-dressing. |
| hive mind n. | 1995 Theodore Sturgeon in Interzone Mar. 45/2 When it sets about ‘reassembling’ the hive-mind which it assumes to be the natural state of affairs on Earth—bringing an assortment of frightened, suffering, incompetent individuals into a gestalt much larger than that featured in More Than Human—it creates an entity far more powerful than the one of which it is a part. |
| moonquake n. | 2009 Great Armada in Asimov’s Science Fiction Apr.–May 44 He initiated a moonquake that blasted the doors from all the cells in which prisoners were held. |
| multiverse n. 1 | 1996 Sleepwalker in Interzone (#105) Mar. 44/1 I used to be a citizen of the world, but now I'm a citizen of the multiverse. |
| primary world n. | 2004 Discovery of Secondary Worlds in N.Y. Review of Science Fiction (#192) Aug. 6/2 The writer, as an omnipotent secondary creator, need only state that the world within the text mirrors the primary world to establish the fact to his own satisfaction. |
| psi n. | 1995 The Creators of Science Fiction: Theodore Sturgeon in Interzone (#93) Mar. 55/1 The novella ‘Need’ (1960) is one of the best of his psi-stories, but it is also one of the most harrowing; here the possession of a superhuman sensitivity becomes an alienating force in its own right, and the self-knowledge which the protagonist gains by virtue of his association with the empath is coldly unflattering. |
| sapient n. | 2000 Fountains of Youth xxvi. 116 I was never happy about those war-addicted fools hijacking the label Homo sapiens. We're the ones who have the opportunity to be true sapients, and I think we ought to take it. |
| science fictional adj. | 1994 Anything Goes in Interzone(#87) Sept. 59/2 (review of Dianna Wynn Jones’ Hexwood) She also retains the kind of science-fictional curiosity which searches assiduously for a sense of wonder in expanding imaginative horizons, and the story contrives to attain a most unexpected conclusion. |
| scientific romance n. | 1985 Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 3 In view of this, the decision to use the old-fashioned and rather quaint term ‘scientific romance’ as a description may seem odd, but the reason for doing so is to make the point that the British tradition of speculative fiction developed during the period under consideration quite separately from the American tradition of science fiction, and can be contrasted with it in certain important ways. |
| scientific romance n. | 1985 Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 9 Scientific romance is the romance of the disenchanted universe: a universe in which new things can and must appear by virtue of the discoveries of scientists and the ingenuity of inventors, and a universe where alien places are populated according to the logic of the theory of evolution. |
| scientific romance n. | 1985 Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 8 A scientific romance is a story which is built around something glimpsed through a window of possibility from which scientific discovery has drawn back the curtain. |
| secondary world n. | 2004 Discovery of Secondary Worlds in N.Y. Review of Science Fiction (#192) Aug. 10/2 Instead of fantastic elements merely intruding upon their home territory, the protagonists of portal fantasies are physically removed to unfamiliar ground, into a secondary world. |
| shapeshifting n. | 1984 The SF Sub-genres in D. Wingrove Science Fiction Source Book (1984) 58 Within SF itself several writers have played the game of constructing pseudoscientific versions of well-known supernatural phenomena such as shape-shifting (e.g. ‘There Shall Be No Darkness’, 1950, by James Blish) and vampirism (e.g. I Am Legend, 1954, by Richard Matheson). |
| shapeshifting adj. | 1995 The Hunger & Ecstasy of Vampires in Interzone (#92) Feb. 39/2 The shapeshifting abilities our ancestors had were associated with considerable powers of self-repair and immunity to most diseases, but…how well do you understand the mechanisms of evolution? |
| slipstream n. | 1994 In the Margins Interzone (#89) Nov. 58/1 Steve Aylett’s debut collection The Crime Studio…employs a parsimonious measure of science-fictional imagery, but it lies in what some critics like to call the ‘slipstream’ of ultra-modern popular culture. |
| space liner n. | 1997 Creators of Science Fiction 10: Hugo Gernsback in Interzone (#126) Dec. 50/1 The final edition of Forecast (Christmas 1959) featured a lead article on spaceliners, a feature on ‘The Odorchestra’…and ‘Jeanne’, which advertised itself as a ‘bizarre romance.’ |
| terraformation n. | 1971 In the Kingdom of the Beasts (1974) 51 The idea of terraformation did occur to me, but I rejected it. |
| terraformation n. | 1999 Hidden Agendas in Asimov’s Science Fiction Sept. 80 It would be the logical means for intelligent species to use in beginning the colonization of other worlds—what used to be called Terraformation. |
| universe n. | 1996 Third Generation Genre Science Fiction in Science-Fiction Studies Nov. 329 Books set in that universe are not set-and-location limited in the same way that the TV shows are, nor are they closely bound to specific special-effects technologies—but that does not mean that they enjoy the same narrative freedom as books set in other science-fictional universes. |
| uplift n. | 2003 Year Zero 116 That much of what the Devil had said was true—but as for the rest of it…well, he seemed to know about her little excursion to Altair, but he hadn’t said a word about the impending uplift of humankind by the greys' psychotropic viruses. |