Diane Duane
28 Quotations from Diane Duane
| alternate world n. | 1983 So you want to be Wizard? 112 Is this an alternate world, maybe? The next universe over? |
| areographer n. | 1990 High Wizardry (1991) 52 ‘Mars,’ Dairine said. The disk drive chirred briefly. ‘Coordinates?’ Dairine knew that areographers used some kind of latitude-longitude system for Mars, but she knew nothing else about it. ‘Default,’ she said, on a hunch. |
| astrogation n. | 1990 Doctor's Orders ix. 234 Our here, the only recourse is good astrogation. |
| avian adj. | 1999 Storm at Eldala 48 Long, graceful, translucent creatures, gossamer-thin, like ribbons of shimmering air, they excited some brief interest. Though avian, they were very unlike other avian species so far discovered. They spent their whole lives in the air, subsisting on airborne algae and plankton native to the high mists of the Rivendale mountain chains. |
| cloak v. | 1984 My Enemy, my Ally 165 Fire burn it, we can build a device that can cloak a whole starship, but we can’t find a way to keep people’s hands from sweating. |
| datapad n. | 1988 Spock’s World 187 Shath consulted a datapad that he was carrying. |
| earther n. | 1990 Doctor's Orders vii. 188 You are interfering with a mission team of the Klingon Empire, Earther. |
| escape pod n. | 1998 Starrise at Corrivale 131 Both of them had been gutted for salvage but could easily be refitted to house either a sensor bay or even a small weapons compartment. The ship’s escape pod had also been salvaged, but its housing bay seemed in good shape. |
| esper n. | 1990 Doctor’s Orders iii. 73 There was no direct way to test esper ratings in a new species. |
| first contact n. | 1999 Storm at Eldala 215 It is a joke…whether it is trying to be one or not… Have you looked at the real ‘first contact’ material yet? |
| fresher n. | 1984 My Enemy, my Ally i. 4 She stopped in front of another of her cabin’s luxuries, one better than private 'fresher or sleeping silks or key lighting. |
| mind-meld n. | 1984 My Enemy, my Ally vii. 98 The researcher at Levaeri determined that such abilities, the mind-techniques such as mindmeld and mindfusion and touch telepathy…could in fact be successfully passed on to the nontalented…by a procedure involving, among other things, selective neutral-tissue grafts to the corpus callosum and spinal cord. |
| neutronium n. | 1984 My Enemy, my Ally xii. 190 McCoy…timed about half his pieces out, preparing to dump them on her like a ton of neutronium in six very visible moves. |
| outworld n. | 1983 So you want to be Wizard? 120 It would be folly to try matching wizardries with the Lone Power on its own ground, this outworld long given over to its rule. |
| phaser n. | 1984 My Enemy, my Ally i. 10 He and Giellun…had finally succeeded in attaching those stealthily-acquired Klingon gunnery augmentation circuits to Bloodwing’s phasers. |
| photon torpedo n. | 1984 My Enemy, my Ally vi. 85 What the hell are they doing here? Mr. Chekov, arm photon torpedoes, prepare to lock phasers on for firing. Mr. Sulu, prepare evasive action but do not execute. |
| planetfall n. | 1990 Doctor’s Orders i. 35 Once we have made planetfall and had time to do some initial assessment. |
| pressor n. | 2000 Swordhunt in Rihannsu i. 432 Now formal sessions of both Senate and Praetorate were being held elsewhere while workmen labored among the ugly pillars and struts of emergency scaffolding inside the building; and outside, tractor beams and pressors were supplementing the normal stresses which had formerly held the dome unsupported over the chamber. The architects had planned superbly, but they had not anticipated that the Chamber would ever have a starship sitting on its roof. |
| pseudopod n. | 1990 Doctor’s Orders ii. 43 One of the creatures in the front circle shook itself all over and, still shaking, moved very, very slowly toward Spock. He didn't move a muscle. The creature put out a long slender pseudopod, gleaming in the sunshine like suddenly blown glass, and poked Spock's boot with it. |
| realspace n. | 1984 My Enemy, My Ally iii. 38 But she saw too little of realspace these days; and the otherspace in which ships moved while in warp was a wavering, uneasy vista, not pleasant to look at at all. |
| sentient n. | 1999 Storm at Eldala 15 Besides the colonists, there’s a considerable presence of scientists studying the riglia, those avian sentients they found. |
| supervillain n. | 1994 Venom Factor i. 28 It was often difficult to take decent pictures when you weren’t behind the camera, but in front of it as Spider-Man. It was tough to pay much attention to ƒ-stops and exposure times when you were duking it out with some bad guy. It was the devil to keep the camera pointed at the action when you were swinging by your webline from one rooftop or another. Also, criminals, both the elite supervillain types and your ordinary garden-variety crooks, were generally not very amenable to staying in the camera frame while you were having it out with them. |
| Terran adj. | 1984 My Enemy, my Ally i. 6 She had been distastefully fascinated to find the word’s meaning rooted in some weird Terran story of twin brothers abandoned in the wild. |
| vision plate n. | 2002 Stealing Elf-King’s Roses 54 Under the spreading Whatsit Tree, in one of the cubicles, a young, short, round, dark-haired, dark-skinned man sat staring at the high-res vision plate set into the cubicle wall. |
| warp n. | 1983 So you want to be Wizard? 47 ‘A warp,’ Nita whispered. ‘A tunnel through spacetime. Are you a white hole?’ |
| warp n. | 1984 My Enemy, my Ally iv. 45 She came out of warp and coasted down into 285’s feeble little gravity well, settling into a long elliptical orbit around the star. |
| warp v. | 1984 My Enemy, my Ally ii. 28 We have to break off our researches here…and go warping off on some fleet maneuver two thousand light-years away. |
| xenobiology n. | 1984 My Enemy, My Ally vi. 79 ‘I thought he was in Life Sciences.’ ‘Xenobiology…This is his hobby, though. It’s useful enough’. |