Where does the name Ansible come from?
The word was invented by Ursula Le Guin. It’s the instantaneous communicator which appears in most of her “Hainish” sf stories: Rocannon’s World in 1966, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed (whose hero develops the physics of the ansible), etc. Orson Scott Card pinched the term in 1977 for his “Ender” series and I pinched it in 1979 as a fanzine title. It’s also been used by Vernor Vinge, Elizabeth Moon and (in a different sense) Paul Park, and has become a standard sf term for (fictional) interstellar comms links which are unhindered by speed-of-light limitations.
