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"[Science fiction is] an integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious."
- Gregory Benford
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| Ultra-Terrene | ||
| Originating from some world other than Earth. |
The prefix "ultra" comes from the Latin meaning "beyond" and "terrene" again from the Latin for "earth".
This is a very early use of this expression, maybe the first.
| Godfrey Stilton, professor of astronomy at the University of California, also on the committee, might have been chosen as the very antithesis of Gaillard in his views and tendencies. Narrow, dogmatic, skeptical of all that could not be proved by line and rule, scornful of all that lay beyond the bourn of a strait empiricism, he was loath to admit the ultra-terrene origin of the vessel, or even the possibility of organic life on any other world than the earth. |
| Technovelgy from An Adventure in Futurity,
by Clark Ashton Smith. Published by Wonder Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
I'm not sure that other writers every really picked up on ultra-terrene; a lot of Smith's stories use this expression. Here's an excerpt from Master of the Asteroid (1932):
This phrase is entirely different from "contra-terrene" which is sometimes abbreviated as CT or "see-tee", and refers to antimatter. See the article for seetee blinker in Collision Orbit by Jack Williamson.
In later years, with the progress of exploration, more than one of the early derelicts has been descried, following a solitary orbit; and the wrecks of others have been found on ultra-terrene shores.
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'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
