I'm reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, which mentions the faster than light communication device, the ansible. I'm a huge fan of Ender's Game, which also has characters using ansibles for communication across vast distances in space. This made me curious about the origin of the word. I imagined it might have some from classic authors like Asimov or Lovecraft. Nope. Le Guin is the first author to coin the term..