The story
Coined by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin in 1966 in her novella Rocannon's World; Le Guin states that she derived it by shortening of answerable in 1996 in her debut novel Rocannon’s World. The word was further spread by its adoption into other science fiction worlds, including by Orson Scott Card in Ender's Game (1986), Vernor Vinge in The Blabber (1988) and Dan Simmons in Hyperion (1989).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.