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"I've been very obsessive about writing science fiction for far too many years. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have given up years ago."
- Charles Stross
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| Overdrive | ||
| A propulsion technology that allows a craft to travel at faster-than-light speed. |
| A nebula is a gas. It is so thin that a comet's tail is solid by comparison, but a ship traveling on overdrive - above the speed of light - does not want to hit even a merely hard vacuum. |
| Technovelgy from First Contact,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Street and Smith Co. in 1945 Additional resources -
|
Raymond Z. Gallun uses the same expression with more details in his 1951 story Brother Worlds, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories:
Or there might be a small fault of function — improper matching of transdimensional coordinates. It could be that when we came out of overdrive at last we would be changed to monsters. The Centaur’s complicated engines needed constant fine adjustments...
We spent most of that trip dozing in our bunks. Hyperspace dulls the mind. Everyone knows that now. And old time-scales just don’t apply. Earthtime our journey took many months. But it didn’t seem anywhere near that long.
Compare to this first use of the phrase faster than light from John W. Campbell's 1931 story Islands of Space.
A few thousand miles out from the Moon, those marvelous new engines of the Centaur went to work and we swung into overdrive. Vision blurred. One felt impossibly but painlessly twisted. A vagueness, characteristic of hyperspace, lingered. And there was fear lest that intricate wonderful apparatus, still short of perfection, might fail entirely, ending our lives in an explosion of matter-energy shifts and phases that we would not feel or know about.
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| SpaceX's Starman Tesla Roadster In Space |
| Warp Drive Tech Back On The Menu |
| JAXA Int Ball 2 Coming Right Along As Star Wars Remote |
| Space Traffic Management (STM) Needed Now |
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I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
'He carried on his person a triggering mechanism sensitive to his heartbeat.'
'...Anything was possible in my imaginary environment.'
'Somewhere in space, a chrome and blue automobile raced the green light of Earth.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair...'
