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- Frederik Pohl
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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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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
