The Ansible

The monthly SF newsletter, written by David Langford and distributed in print and (for free) by email. It has been running discontinuously since 1979.

• http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Ansible/ The archive
• http://www.ansible.co.uk/ Useless page
• http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8720/ansible.htm The Ansible Year in Review (1987)

I'd highly recommend subscribing: it's an unbeatable source of SF information. The Ansible is for SF what Need To Know is for the net. -- TA

The Ansible is named after the faster-than-light communication device described in Ursula Le Guin's books (mentioned first in 'Rocannon's World' (1966)), which has subsequently found its way into the SF lexicon, turning up in the Enders Game books by Orson Scott Card?, for example.

'Ansible' is an anagram of lesbian. It's not clear if Le Guin did this intentionally. Wikipedia <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible> reports that this wasn't the primary intention, but does not explicitly state that it wasn't a secondary intention.