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"When you're making a revolution in cyberspace, things look rather different from the way the 1980s cyberpunks wrote it."
- Charles Stross
 |
| Absolute Black | ||
| A material so absolutely black that it absorbed all incident light. |
Here's the quote about the stuntship whose sole purpose was to fly into the sun to provide spectacular effects for a rock concert.
| "That," he said, "that... is really bad for the eyes."
It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it. "It's so... black!" said Ford Prefect. "You can hardly make out its shape... light just seems to fall into it!" The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it. "Your eyes just slide off it..." said Ford in wonder. |
| From Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
by Douglas Adams. Published by Not known in 1980 Additional resources -
|
The earliest reference to this idea (that I can find, anyway) is the black coating from E.E. 'Doc Smith's 1939 novel Gray Lensman.
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'Then he saw the geek ... leaning against one of the slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
How long ago did Robert Heinlein write about skiing on dry alien worlds?
'There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.'
'A cable, here, from the controller to the interface plug... wires from that to the brain.'
