downtime adv.

esp. in time-travel contexts: in, into, or toward the past; cf. uptime adv.

Time Travel

  • 1972 P. Anderson There Will Be Time (1973) 51 Poul Anderson bibliography

    He would take certain stamps and coins uptime and sell them to dealers; he would go downtime with a few aluminum vessels, which were worth more than gold.

  • 1978 C. Kilian Empire of Time (1985) 38 Crawford Kilian bibliography

    Downtime, the air was clean, the water sweet.

  • 1978 C. Kilian Empire of Time (1985) 180 Crawford Kilian bibliography

    You know, of course, about the new chronoplanes they’ve discovered far downtime, in the Permian? Four of them so far.

  • 1983 J. Varley Millennium ii. 21 John Varley

    I fall downtime to the beginning of the universe.

  • 1991 R. Silverberg Thebes of Hundred Gates 41 Robert Silverberg

    But of course he had been loaded to the brim with antigens before leaving downtime.

  • 2002 G. A. Landis At Dorado in Asimov’s Science Fiction Oct.–Nov. 72 page image Geoffrey A. Landis bibliography

    A little information can leak from the future into the past, but history must be consistent. If enough information leaks downtime to threaten an inconsistency, the offending wormhole connection can snap.

Research requirements

antedating 1973
Earliest cite

Poul Anderson, "There Will Be Time"
Research History
Fred Galvin submitted a cite from a 1985 reprint of Crawford Kilian's "The Empire of Time"; we would like to verify the cite in the 1978 first edition.

We would like cites of any date from other sources. There are a few examples in the opposite sense, 'in or into the future'; we need to be careful about this, and consider an entry for this sense.

Last modified 2021-02-22 13:58:37
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.