“Orbital Mechanic!”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Have you finished plotting our course to Makemake yet?”
I think they were steering a delicate course between the mundane use of normal terms in a new environment and using terms that no one would understand or that they’d have to use a lot of really wasted words to explain. “Astrogration” is understandable yet different.
This exactly. Think about some news stories you’ve seen or conversations you’ve had, and ask yourself how much of it would make any damn sense to someone living even 30 years ago. I wrote a column once with a bit of dialog none of which I’d have understood when I got out of college after majoring in Computer Science. I at least knew what the Arpanet was.
Most sf writers err on the side of comprehensibility, I think.
I think astrogation is too firmly entrenched to go away.
Few things:
When someone says to cadets going on graduation fieldtrip on new plant: “Remember, beware Stobor!” I assume that they’ve salted the planet with varius robot adversaries but no. Why does the author use word stobor if the’se noi robots in the story?
In 90’s in my local watering hole someone asked what will PDA’s be called when they become commonplace and another guy answered “phones.” And we all agreed. If, what we today call a phone, would be given Graham Bell he would not know what it is.
Even ‘navigator’ and ‘geologist’ are too complicated…
In French, the verb “to land” (for an aircraft) is atterrir. Which contains terre, which can mean “land” (as opposed to “sea” or “air”) or “earth”. It seemed an odd word to use when discussing landing on the Moon, so in the 1960s they started to use the verb alunir (and the noun alunissage, etc.) (see NGrams). Now they’ve started using amarsissage for landings on Mars, but the authorities are discouraging going any further in that direction.
Warning: you’re going off course!
The purpose behind the neologisms was to create an in-group slang. Read the letters to the editors and the fanzines of the day and you’ll see that they are filled with words adapted from the stories and coinages of their own. The sf fan-speak was the predecessor to hippie-speak and leet-speak and the multitudinous other in-groups that created a new language to feel special and oposed to the normals. The sf fans created the nerd culture that all subsequent outsider groups slavishly followed. That’s their historic importance, however quaint the language seems from a century forward.
When they get to uranusissage let me know.
Protide Capsules, Zykron the Insistent, Moons of Meepzore, Muldroff Iron Fields…all perfectly relevant sci-fi jargon, which aren’t so much clever substitutes for words but examplary lexical innovations that I hope stand the test of time.
I swear I once read some old pulp space novel from the 60s that unironically used the word “space dollars” to refer to money.
Asimov, who wasn’t the best at terminology, used “globo-dollar” as a term in a story in 1991.
I prefer “dollarpound” myself.
Are these really any worse than the once almost universal “credits”?
(images at link)
I’m not sure that there would even need to be a stand-in for the concept of “navigation”. It’s not as if a spacecraft is ever going to be in any state of uncertainty as to where they are, how to get where they want to go, or have a need to avoid any navigation hazards. It’s the void of space, all landmarks are abundantly evident, there’s no variable weather or space currents or avoidable navigation hazards to speak of.
Well, in Tunnel in the Sky (which is the only use of stobor that I know of), the point is that “stobor” aren’t a specific thing, but a general danger. It’s meant to keep them on their toes, in kind of the same way that the protagonist’s older sister will let him take knives but not a gun. Also, stobor is not immediately obvious as a palindrome for robots, especially when said out loud. It’s like the palindrome for Bolton being Notlob.
NASA would seem to disagree with you, but what do they know?
And a space probe operating in an environment like the systems of moons and rings surrounding one of the big planets in the Outer Solar System—like Cassini or Juno—could potentially encounter hazards. IIRC, there was a some discussion of sending one of the Pioneer probes through a “gap” in Saturn’s rings; they decided against it, which is just as well, as subsequent observations showed the “gap” wasn’t so empty, and any spacecraft flying through it at orbital speeds would have been quickly destroyed.
Generally, the scientists are going to want to get up close to the interesting things (whether we’re talking about a planetary rover or an orbital or fly-by probe); the engineers are going to want to stay the hell away from things that could abruptly and permanently end the mission. Hence the need for careful navigation, to ensure the probe gets close enough to get the scientific data (and pretty pictures) which are its reason for existing, but doesn’t get too close.
Major kudos to that guy for thinking of that. I’ve often lamented that the best Chester Gould (creator of Dick Tracy) could come up with was “2-way wrist radio”.
… but not until recently. In the 20th century it made sense!
I’m trying to remember which novel it was where the really stunning prediction wasn’t the idea of the cell phone but the idea that you might leave it at home or turn it off so that people would stop bothering you for a while.
Space Cadet, by Robert Heinlein.