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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
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| Extraecliptic Travel Lanes | ||
| Organized interplanetary travel using routes not confined to the ecliptic. |
The ecliptic is the extension or projection of the plane of the Earth's orbit out towards the sky.
| It is described as an elongated ellipsoid of about five million miles along major axis and the gravitic equivalent at center is estimated to be of the order of several thousand megabars. Correspondingly strong ‘highs’ have been detected both above and below it as well as in front of and behind it, so that extraecliptic travel lanes are as impassable as the usual ones. |
| From A Question of Salvage,
by Malcolm Jameson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1939 Additional resources -
|
The use of the word "extraecliptic" is quite unusual, and this is probably the first appearance in science fiction. You might find it in texts about astrology or surveying earlier in the 20th century.
In the 1939 Lester del Rey story Habit, racing rockets head from Mars to a point above the ecliptic, down to Jupiter and back to Mars.
Going above the ecliptic was also recommended to avoid asteroids in Recoil (1943) by George O. Smith.
Compare to space-lanes from Crashing Suns (1928) by Edmond Hamilton.
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'THE red tennis robot scooted desperately across the court...'
'The Consul remembered his first glimpse of the kilometer-long treeship...'
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'Once the target is confirmed, it uses an IR laser to send a coded signal back to the parent, clearing it to attack.'
'I filled your bullet hole with flesh putty and the lattice.'
'... it will be easy to form an alphabet which shall enable us to converse with the inhabitants of the moon.'
'From the tower's huge octagonal base radiate wide silvery strips...'
'It was about five feet long... a black bullet head and red camera eyes.'
'The Law Society has strict rules on the use of pseudo-intelligent software...'
