James Blish
See all quotes from James Blish
12 First Quotations from James Blish
| anti-agathic n. | 1954 At Death’s End in Astounding Science Fiction May 36/1 So what you’re looking for now is not an antibiotic—an anti-life drug—but an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug. |
| anti-agathic adj. | 1954 At Death’s End in Astounding Science Fiction May 41/1 You see, Joint knows about the anti-agathic drug, even though Appropriations and the Pentagon don’t. |
| construct n. | 1970 Spock Must Die! i. 5 I am, by definition, not the same man who went into a transporter for the first time twenty years ago. I am a construct made by a machine after the image of a dead man—and the hell of it is, not even I can know how exact the imitation is, because—well, because obviously if anything is missing I wouldn’t remember it. |
| Franken- prefix | 1967 To Love Another in Analog Apr. 23/2 One of the lab men said that we have a Frankenslime to deal with. |
| gas giant n. | 1952 Solar Plexus in J. Merril Beyond Human Ken 106 A quick glance over the boards revealed that there was a magnetic field of some strength near by, one that didn’t belong to the invisible gas giant revolving half a million miles away. |
| pantropy n. | 1952 Surface Tension in Galaxy Magazine Aug. 8/2 There may be just the faintest of residuums—panatropy’s [sic; spelled pantropy in later editions] given us some data to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory. |
| positronic adj. | 1936 Trail of the Comet in Planeteer (#5) Mar. 6 ‘What’s up?’ The Planeteer brought out a heavy hammer and applied it diligently to the slats of the crate. ‘Positronic—uh—secondary screen—’ he replied, between mightly [sic] tugs. |
| sleeper ship n. | 1968 Star Trek 2 107 ‘I've got it!’ Maria said suddenly. ‘It’s a sleeper ship!’ This meant nothing to Kirk, but McCoy said: ‘Suspended animation?’ ‘Yes. They were necessary for long space trips until about the year 2018. They didn’t have the warp drive until then, so even interplanetary travel took them years. We'll find crewmen in there, or passengers, sleeping, waiting for the end of their journey’. |
| spindizzy n. | 1950 Okie in Astounding Science Fiction Apr. 71/2 The waste inherent in using the spindizzy only in a ship could not be disguised. Once antigravity was an engineering reality, it was no longer necessary to design ships specifically for space travel, for neither weight nor aerodynamic lines meant anything any more. |
| teleport n. 2 | 1949 Let the Finder Beware! in Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec. 58/1 ‘I doubt that you could keep him in jail for ten minutes.’ ‘Because he’s a teleport?’ |
| three vee n. | 1954 At Death’s End in Astounding Science Fiction May 16/2 Paige supposed that the Believers had managed to….project a 3V tape against the glass crystals with polarized ultraviolet light. |
| tri-D n. | 1950 Okie in Astounding Science Fiction Apr. 90/2 Get a picture of him somewhere, a tri-di if they have them here. |