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"[Science fiction is] nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible."
- Gregory Benford
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| Alderson Point | ||
| One end of a tramline, a path between stars that can be traversed using a hyperdrive engine. |
Also known at the "Crazy Eddie" point. The idea presented here is that there are pairs of points widely distant in space that are connected outside of normal space. A vessel equipped with the Alderson Drive can take advantage of this pair of points, moving from one to another without traversing the space in between.
| I've been on trips where it was faster to drive over to another Alderson point, make a Jump, move around in the new system, Jump somewhere else, keep doing that until you come back to the original system at a different place - do all that and it would still be faster than merely to sail across the original system in normal space. |
| Technovelgy from The Mote in God's Eye,
by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle). Published by Simon & Schuster in 1974 Additional resources -
|
The phrase "jump" as well as a description of the process, first occurred in in the 1932 story Invaders from the Infinite by John Campbell (see jump).
Compare to jump point from Bill for Delivery (1964) by Christopher Anvil,
collapsar jump from The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman,
hyperspace jump from Foundation(1951) by Isaac Asimov,
planoforming from The Game of Rat and Dragon (1953) by Cordwainer Smith,
jumpdoor from Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert.
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
