blaster

Sometimes you find an antedating that is much earlier than you expected. Such is the case with blaster, the science fiction word for a ray gun.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the science fiction use of blaster to 1950, with a first citation from an Isaac Asimov story, and I would have pegged that as about right for the era of the word’s invention. But this entry hasn’t been updated recently, and the word turns out to be another quarter century older. From Nictzin Dyalhis’s “When the Green Star Waned,” which appeared in the April 1925 issue of Weird Tales, in which a human encounters an alien life form and immediately kills it:

And here we found life, such at it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok’s height, with gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.

Well it was for me that, in obedience to Hul Jok’s imperative command, I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me; for as I blundered full upon the monstrosity it upheaved its ugly bulk—how I do not know, for I saw no legs nor did it have wings—to one edge and would have flopped down upon me, but instinctively I slid forward the catch on the tiny Blastor, and the foul thing vanished—save for a few fragments of its edges—smitten into nothingness by the vibration hurled forth from that powerful little disintegrator.

It was the first time I had ever used one of the terrible instruments, and I was appalled at the instantaneous thoroughness of its workings.

The Blastor made no noise—it never does, nor do the big Ak-Blastors which are the fighting weapons used by the Aethir-Torps, when they are discharging annihilation—but that nauseous ugliness I had removed gave vent to a sort of bubbling hiss as it returned to its original atoms.

There are older uses of blaster in very different senses. It was used to refer to a trumpeter as early as the late sixteenth century, and Charles Cotton, in his 1664 translation of Paul Scarron’s mock-epic Virgile travesti, uses the word to refer to Boreas, the north wind:

And Sirrah, you there: Goodman Blaster,
Go tell that farting Fool your Master,
That such a whistling Scab, as he,
Was ne’er cut out to rule the Sea.

And the poet John Marston uses blaster in a metaphorical sense when he dedicates his 1598 book of satires, The Scourge of Villanie, to detraction (slander):

Foule canker of faire vertuous action,
Vile blaster of the freshest bloomes on earth,
Enuies abhorred childe, Detraction,
I heare expose, to thy all-taynting breath
The issue of my braine, snarle, raile, barke, bite,
Know that my spirit scornes Detractions spight.

By the eighteenth century, blaster was being used in connection with explosives, and in the twentieth the word moved into criminal slang, referring to safe-blowers, gunmen, and the guns themselves.

And by 1980, music could emanate from ghetto blasters, large portable radio/cassette players. From a review of Tom Wolfe’s 1980 book In Our Time that appeared in the Des Moines Register on 26 October of that year:

Having established his ground, he then devotes a paragraph to each thing in the ’70s that he thinks was significant: disco, Johnny Rotten, British soap operas, George McGovern, the move “The Great Gatsby,” Elvis Presley, Jonestown, designer jeans, box-office smashes, hand-held calculators, Alex Haley, Perrier water, light beer, Muhammad Ali, short hair, South Vietnam, Woody Allen, brain research, People magazine, Richard Nixon, ghetto-blaster radios and the New Left.

Sources:

Cotton, Charles. “Scarronides: Or, Virgil Travestie” (1664). In The Genuine Poetical Works of Charles Cotton, Esq., fifth edition. London: T. Osborne, et al., 1765, 18. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Dyalhis, Nictzin. “When the Green Star Waned.” Weird Tales, 5.4, April 1925, 3–12 and 183–91 at 6/2. Archive.org.

Eagar, Harry. “Skewering the ’70s.” Des Moines Register (Iowa), 26 October 1980, 4C/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d. (accessed 6 April 2025), s.v. blaster, n.1, blaster, n.2, ghetto, adj.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 17 November 2024, s.v. blaster, n.

Marston, John. The Scourge of Villanie. Three Books of Satyres. London: James Roberts for John Buzbie, 1598, sig. A3. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. blaster, n.

Prucher, Jeff, ed. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007, s.v. blaster, n.

Photo credit: JMC, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.