See all quotes from Theodore Sturgeon
antigrav n. | 1941 | Artnan Process in Astounding Science-Fiction June 56/2 The ship settled down gently, her antigrav plates moaning.
empathy n. | [ 1945 | Killdozer! 230 Places with Typewriters: we are writing stories about the future about machines that think creatively…about empathy, second-order space, contra-terrene matter, levitation, astral separation, telepathy, the intuitive mutation, universal synthesis, time-travel, silicon life, and the evolution of intelligence in rats. ]
null-grav adj. | 1957 | Pod in Barrier in Galaxy Science Fiction Sept. 13/1 We’d taken off with a null-grav tug and slipped into second-order matrix within six hours—all very fast and painless, thanks to the Luanae.
reaction drive n. | 1949 | Minority Report in Astounding Science Fiction June 137/1 They fired up the reaction drive and began to move toward the sun.
Sturgeon’s Law n. | [ 1957 | On Hand: A Book in Venture Science Fiction Mag. Sept. 78 Sturgeon had a revelation. For twenty years he has been defending s f against its lay critics, especially those who buy on the open market anything which calls itself s f, sieve it with a warp and a woof, and dish up the cruddiest bits to the Saturday Review or the New Yorker with the smarmy comment that This Is Science Fiction. It isn’t as easy as one might think to argue with these people, primarily because they really do take their horrible examples out of the s f field, a field which is, they inform the world, ninety-percent crud. And on that hangs Sturgeon’s revelation. It came to him that s f is indeed ninety-percent crud, but that also—Eureka!—ninety-percent of everything is crud. All things—cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we each happen to like. ]
Sturgeon’s Law n. | [1957 | in Venture Science Fiction July 78 There’s Malcolm Jameson on ‘Space War Tactics’, a discussion on ‘Fuel for the Future’—the machine to be fueled happens to be human—by the articulate Jack Hatcher; a fine bit of tongue-in-cheek on the sad state of the copyright laws in the days of interstellar intercourse, by Donald F. Reines; and then there’s your reviewer’s personal favorite, as must needs be for one who has reduced the cosmos to Sturgeon’s Law: Nothing Is Always Absolutely So from a lifelong search for something you can really count on—it’s Frederik Pohl’s ‘How to Count on Your Fingers’. ]
trideo n. | 1953 | Mr. Costello, Hero in Galaxy Science Fiction Dec. 69/2 Actually, I suppose there’s really only one—though, of course, there'll be someone else in the studio at the time.…But on trideo it looks like four Lucilles, all speaking at once, sort of in chorus.
trideo n. | 1953 | Mr. Costello, Hero in Galaxy Science Fiction Dec. 74/1 Mr Costello rapped the trideo screen in front of him. He said, ‘Make it a real good one, Lucille, real good. I'll be watching.’