Originally published at: "Planet" as a verb: a new entry in the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction | Boing Boing
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so we can never planet (upon) pluto?
there never was a better recommendation. Thanks!
This seems like a good place to state my distaste for the word “deplane”.
Tattoo doesn’t like that.
I would gladly disembark with you.
It’s not true that George O. Smith “never really got around to plot or characterization”. Find a copy of his collection of Venus Equilateral stories. There’s romance, industrial espionage and intrigue, a fully 3-D villain (Mark Kingman), mortal danger, economic sabotage, and so on. Also he invented the (techno) teleporter beam. Others, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, had teleportation, but George O. Smith was the first with a sciency discussion of how it would work (using a modified ancient Martian vacuum tube originally meant to transmit power). Space is perfect for experimenting with and developing vacuum tubes. They were the future, and still sort of are. Present-day ionic thrusters on spacecraft are vacuum tubes. File under electrical space travel.
You can always moon it.
Riiight, he never once considered the effect on society of a universal duplicator.
The Crypto Bros who think that they can retreat to an island and churn out “wealth” in isolation should really read those parts of Venus Equilateral. (I forget how he handled human duplication.)
Or they could just…plan it…well.
Or not.
I’ll allow it.
[SCENE: Two lovers, reunited after being separated by a universe and vast interstellar conflict.]
L1: (hungrily) “Baby, I want to deplane you so bad.”
L2: (desperate) “Just planet me now, right here!”
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