Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"I don't have an e-mail address. As much as I admire the Internet I suffer literally agoraphobia, which in it's original sense means a fear of the marketplace. I do not want to receive three hundred e-mail messages per week from strangers…"
- William Gibson
 |
| 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.
Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from First Contact
More Ideas
and Technology by Murray Leinster
Tech news articles related to First Contact
Tech news articles related to works by Murray Leinster
| ISS Plagued By Leak - Again! |
| Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug |
| Crystalline Structures In Space, You Say? |
| Amazing Photonic Crystal Light Sail |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Science Fiction Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
