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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Energy Weapon | ||
| A device that fires pure energy, used as a weapon. |
As far as I know, the first use of the phrase "energy weapon".
| “Those boys make battleships. The darned things are so long, I’d have to melt down two hundred feet of ship before they’d all be gone. And they are supposed to be able to move. You know, I’ll bet they haven’t got any energy weapon like that transpon beam, and they probably wonder what manner of heat ray I have.”
“I thought,” said Carlisle, “that you said energy rays — rays that depended on energy for destruction — couldn’t be made.” “I did. And I meant it. Figure it out,” returned Aarn with a grin. “I figure,” said Spencer, “that the beam is not dangerous — it’s what it carries. Does that make any real difference ?” “That’s the answer — and it does,” replied Aarn. |
| Technovelgy from The Mightiest Machine,
by John W. Campbell. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1934 Additional resources -
|
A.E. van Vogt makes use of this phrase soon after, in his short story Seesaw, published by Astounding Fiction in 1941:
The window display was made up of an assortment of rather curiously shaped guns, rifles as well as small arms; and a glowing sign in the window stated: THE FINEST ENERGY WEAPONS IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.
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'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
