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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
 |
| Dirtside | ||
| The surface of a planet. |
Very early use of this phrase.
| Sam stopped a passing engineer's mate. "Hey, shipmate - we're fresh caught. Where's the crew's mess?
"Clockwise about eighty and inboard, this deck." He looked them over. "Fresh caught, eh? Well, you'll find out." "Like that, huh?" "Worse. A madhouse squared. If I wasn't married, I'd 'a' stayed dirtside." |
| Technovelgy from Starman Jones,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Scribners in 1953 Additional resources -
|
This is a common phrase in science fiction. Here's another example, from Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty:
Compare to Farside from A Fall of Mooniest (1961) by Arthur C. Clarke.
"Sinclair wants to do some outside work while we're dirtside." He took out his pocket computer and wrote quickly with the attached stylus.
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| Is China Mining Helium-3 On The Moon's Farside? |
| Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space |
| Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic |
| Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station |
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
