New SF term: Unrealitivity
by Doc on May.23, 2010, under General News
I was thinking about something recently, and a discussion on a mailing list provoked my mind to come up with a new term. “Unrealitivity” – A merger of “unreal” and “relativity” (as in Einstein’s theories of…). It is any sort of SF technology or phenomenon that allows for incredible speeds without regards for relativity, speed of light, acceleration forces, etc. without any sort of basis in other potential theories or at least a technical explanation – like warp drive, hyperspace, etc. For instance: “The nuclear waste dump that exploded on the dark side of the moon thrust it out of Earth’s orbit at unrealitivistic speeds across the universe…” Or, “The spaceship’s unrealitivity drive brought them to Tau Ceti in two days…”
A Google search at least seems to indicate that it is fairly unique, with only a handful of hits and nothings to indicate usage other than a mistyped word…
May 24th, 2010 on 9:33 am
I’ve seen “non-relativistic”, although I didn’t find it at dictionary.com. It did have an entry for unrelativistic though, as an adjective under “relativistic”.
May 24th, 2010 on 9:46 am
Right…non-relativistic (or unrelativistic, but I think the former is preferred) is an existing term referring to a drive that does not obey relativity in general – i.e. any FTL drive.
UnREALitivistic is one that does so in a completely unbelievable way, or simply has a very large dose of handwavium…
May 24th, 2010 on 12:27 pm
Well, there is the Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy 🙂