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"We're about 20 minutes away from the point where Clarke's law kicks in and technology becomes indistinguishable from magic."
- Peter Watts
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| Terminator Zone | ||
| The area between solar illumination and shade. |
As far as I know, this is the first use of this phrase in science fiction (or anywhere else).
| Dore Swithin was on his feet again, his face broken out in curious mottlings as evidence of his strange experience in outer space. He ran the heating plant, and ran it well. The waste gases of the oxygen manufacture were piped to the terminator zone, there heated by the sun’s tremendous radiations, and then forced back into the chambers. An inexhaustible supply of electricity was assured by Bill Purtell’s happy thought of rigging up thermocouples of beryllium-steel and copper in closed circuit. One point of junction was set on moveable platforms in the terminator zone to follow continuously the heat of the sun. The other junction remained always in the shade at extremely low temperatures. |
| Technovelgy from Exiles of the Moon,
by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat). Published by Wonder Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Note that this is a different usage from that expressed in, for example, Foundation and Empire (originally published in 1945); see the article for ribbon world. In this case, the terminator zone is a permanent feature of the planet that is tidally locked to its sun.
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