Note bene, on the uses of Techno-Babble: In the writing of science fiction, it is necessary to employ a great deal of what is known in the trade as ‘techno-babble’. Techno-babble is simply a string of highly scientific or high-tech sounding words intended to convey a sense that Yes, Virginia, this is the future.
All terms and phrases not found in this glossary may be assumed to be techno-babble to within a reasonable margin of error.
antimatter – every subatomic particle (such as the electron, proton and neutron) has an opposite: a particle that performs the same function but has the opposite charge. For instance, the positron is the opposite of an electron and has a positive charge. The most spectacular property of antimatter is the fact that if it comes into contact with ordinary matter both will be annhilated explosively. Is that cool or what?!?
The Badlands – a nebula at the edge of settled space known for its lawless ways, its unusual concentration of black holes and its complete lack of sanitary restroom facilities.
black hole – imagine a man who is so fat that he is actually crushed under his own weight. Now imagine that his weight is so immense it actually crushes itself down to an infinitesimally small point. Now there’s a weird image. The same principle applies to black holes, which are former stars that have collapsed. A black hole is so dense and heavy that even light cannot escape the pull of its gravitational field – thus, the name. It is believed that at the bottom of black holes there may actually be tears in the fabric of space and time, gateways to something outside of our universe.
cryo-sleep / cryogenic hibernation / cryo-chamber – cryogenic hibernation is the process of literally freezing a living organism to preserve it alive for an indefinite amount of time. Subjects have frequently compared the experience to being in line at the DMV.
cyborg – a human being with some mechanical parts (an entirely mechanical being is called an android).
EMP / EMP device – stands for Electro-Magnetic Pulse. This is usually a form of weapon that releases a burst of energy that fries electronic equipment but leaves humans unscathed. Believed to have originally been developed by the Microsoft Corporation in response to the iPod.
The Engineers – a vanished race of super-beings, possibly descended from humans; so named because of their massive engineering projects: artificial worlds frequently the size of a planet or larger. It is believed that it is the Engineers who are responsible, either intentionally or inadvertently, for accelerating the destruction of the universe. Unfortunately, they haven’t stuck around to explain why they did this.
entropy – disorder or unusable energy; entropy is why a window may suddenly shatter into shards of glass but shards of glass never spontaneously form a window; simply put, entropy is the process of things falling apart. Unsurprisingly to anyone who lives there, the universe is said to be increasing in entropy.
nebula – a vast cloud of gas in space.
null spin gee – an unnecessarily fancy way of saying ‘zero gravity’.
permafoam – A fantastic, durable building material which can be sprayed down and quickly sculpted into any shape. It hardens in mere hours and is also completely fictional.
plastisteel – another entirely made-up futuristic building material. Imagine steel… only bend-ier.
rail gun / magnetized rail pellet — in low or zero gravity situations, fire-arms are somewhat impractical as they will send the shooter flying backwards in the opposite direction. Rail guns use magnetism to propel small metal slugs at super high velocities, simultaneously solving this problem and creating an unspeakably cool type of energy weapon to boot.
The Sphere / Sphere Confederacy – The Sphere is the name of the world ship that brought the ancestors of our heroes to this part of the universe some four hundred years ago. No one knows exactly where they are or how they got there, because all the passengers were cryogenically frozen for the duration of the journey. The Sphere Confederacy is the name of the loose government that has sprung up in the core colonized worlds.
teleport / teleportation – familiar from Star Trek, teleportation is the act of transporting matter instantaneously from one point to another. While in that show this was achieved by the use of some kind of energy beam, in the world of Blackmoon it actually involves entirely different principles having to do with space and time, not that this makes it any less of a deus ex machina.
terraforming – from the Latin, ‘terra’ meaning ‘earth’ and ‘forming’ meaning ‘forming’. The idea being that you take some relatively unihabitable place and modify it so that it is fit for humans to live in. A breatheable atmosphere, water and plant-life are generally considered prequesites. Candidates for such a process in our immediate neighborhood include Mars, a copule of Saturn’s moons, and Detroit.
world ship – a man-made spacecraft capable of transporting hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, often in a state of cryo-sleep. The smell is often unbelievable.
worldlet – an artificial structure on the scale of a moon or a planet. Not necessarily spherical. Could also refer to a settled asteroid.
