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"We'd have most of what we predicted of the conquest of space, if we hadn't ignored parasite control."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Inverspace | ||
| For faster than light travel. |
Harlan has a clever and unique name for this commonplace idea.
| It was always night in inverspace.
The ship ploughed constantly through a swamp of black, with metal inside, and metal outside, and the cold, unchanging devildark beyond the metal. Men hated inverspace — they sometimes took the years-long journey through normal space, to avoid the chilling mystery of inverspace. For one moment the total black would surround the ship, and the next they would be sifting through a field of changing, flickering crazy-quilt colors. Then ebony again, then light, then dots, then shafts, then the dark once more. It was everchanging, like a madman’s dream. But not interestingly changing, so one would wish to watch, as one might watch a kaleidescope. This was strange, and unnatural, something beyond the powers of the mind, or the abilities of the eye to comprehend. Ports were allowed only in the officer’s country, and those had solid lead shields that would slam down and dog closed at the slap of a button. Nothing else could be done, for men were men, and space was his eternal enemy. But no man willingly stared back at the deep of inverspace. |
| Technovelgy from Deeper Than the Darkness,
by Harlan Ellison. Published by Infinity Science Fiction in 1957 Additional resources -
|
Here is a bit more:
The invership whipped past the myriad colors of inverspace, hurtling through that not-space toward the alien cluster.
"Omalo! Omalo snap-out!”
The ship was heading toward Omalo, sun of the Delgarth system. It had been translated into inverspace by a Driver named Carina Correia. She had warped the ship through, and gone back to her deep-sleep, till she was needed at Omalo snapout.
Now the ship whirled through the crazy-quilt of inverspace, cutting through to the star-system of Earth’s adversary.
Gunnderson sat in the cabin with the brush-cut blond ensign. All through the trip, since blastoff and snap-out, the Pyrotic had been kept in his stateroom...
The cry roared through the companionways, bounced down the halls and against the metal hull of the invership, sprayed from the speakers, and deafened the men asleep beside their squawk-boxes.
The ship ploughed through a maze of colors whose names were unknown, skiiiiittercd in a nameless direction, and popped out, shuddering. There it was. The sun of Delgart. Omalo. Big. And golden. With planets set about it like boulders on the edge of the sea. The sea that was space, and from which this ship had come.
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'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.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
