John Barnes
5 Quotations from John Barnes
| earthshine n. | 1996 Encounter with Tiber vii. 124 Jiang’s protest died in his ears as Chris turned and headed back toward their lander. He didn’t listen for more, but kept moving in light, easy bounds, something like a kangaroo and a bit like a squirrel. Around him the lunar surface was a dim gray, lit only by starlight and by reflected Earthshine and sunlight from the bright distant peaks. He knew without looking that Peter would be right behind him, but he was pleased to see Xiao Be come up on his right; Jiang would have no choice but to follow. |
| moon base n. | 1994 Mother of Storms (1995) 76 They treat the Euromodule as sort of a hotel room, where their guys sleep between fixing robots, or on their way to and from their tiny moonbase while they assemble their ships here. |
| space-pale adj. | 1986 Man Who Pulled Down the Sky 99 They were all armed, and the ensign with them was still space-pale and looked young. All of them, except one older sergeant, looked scared to death. |
| timeline n. | 1997 Patton’s Spaceship 91 ‘Look, in your timeline, who won the Peloponnesian War, and how long did it last?’ Anybody in any branch of history at least knows that. ‘Sparta. And it lasted about thirty years.’ ‘Well, in this timeline Athens won, very early in the war and all but bloodlessly. And then a couple of people you didn’t have in your timeline—Thucydides the Younger and Kleophrastes were the important ones—created a new Athenian Empire, with a very generous citizenship policy, structured as a sort of federation. That federation went on to win control of the Mediterranean, and then to conquer Asia east to Burma, all of Europe to the Urals, and all of Africa. A couple of thousand years later, they fought a long war with China over control of the New World—and at the end of that, Athens ruled the Earth, which meant one generation later, everyone as Athenian.’ |
| tribble n. | 2004 Gaudeamus (2014) xxii. 302 She leaned forward, focusing her attention on a young man with a thick wad of unruly black hair that looked like he’d rolled over on a tribble in his sleep. |