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"The answer to the problem of information overload on the Net is reputations… engineer a system called a reputation server."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Sub-C | ||
| Of ships, older models that travel at speeds below that of light. |
| Irma Gordon was one of the original settlers of the Riga system. Origin unknown. Probably born out in space — in one of the old sub-C ships. A strange feeling drifted through him. The little old creature. The centuries she had seen! The changes. |
| Technovelgy from The Impossible Planet,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Not Known in 1953 Additional resources -
|
Stanley Schmidt used the same expression in War of Independence (1982):
"At that time our ancestors didn’t even know the Redskins existed, and the incident scared them silly. They stopped trying for the stars for about a third of a century. Things didn’t get going again until Kokes stumbled onto c-barrier tunneling and people met the Redskins. They found out in a general way what happened to the Columbus, but they still didn’t know where it wound up. Well, it wound up on Midnnoa.”
Murray nodded. So the wreck on Midnnoa was the Columbusl The Chercqs, then, were not just any shipwreck survivor descendants. 'They were one of the two oldest human colonies outside the Solar System — and still one of the most remote.
Compare to ftl from The Enchanted Forest (1950) by Fritz Leiber, which is as far as I know the first use of this abbreviation for faster-than-light from Islands of Space (1931) by John W. Campbell, which is as far as I know, the first use of that phrase in science fiction.
"Okay, brace yourself. You may remember there was a false start before interstellar expansion from Sol really got going. A pair of sub-c ships called the Mayflower and the Columbus set out together for Alpha Centauri. The Mayflower made it. The Columbus hit the wake of a Redskin warpship bound for Alpha Persei and disappeared.
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| Crystalline Structures In Space, You Say? |
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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
