Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-50.190.130.42-20140529032222

In "The Nightmare in Silver, the captain of the platoon calls a piece of broken equipment "a solid state sub-ether ansible class communicator." Ansible is the term invented by Ursula LeGuin for faster than light speed communication. Ether could refer to the aether (substance thought by early scientists to fill the void) or ethernet (computer networking.) 