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"We didn't have a telephone and our family until I was about 15, in high school."
- Ray Bradbury
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| Paralyzing Ray (Bolar Current) | ||
| A beam that forces a person to remain rooted to a particular spot. |
| From a porte beside one of the stern's bull's-eyes a faint beam shot out and caught them. And persisted, clinging. Georg felt the tingle of it; felt his feet gripping the ground, fastened as though by a giant electro-magnet. The paralyzing ray. He saw Aura's figure waver from the shock; then stiffen... And he and the girl beside him stood rooted.*
The Bolar current, popularly misnamed the paralyzing ray, has no effect whatever of a physical paralysis. It merely generates a sudden gravitational force, transitory, but of extreme intensity so that the victim stands momentarily "rooted to the ground." The subject is highly technical of explanation. The affected material object does not gain an extreme weight, as in the case of an electronized gravity plate with full attractive force: the paralyzing beam acts more in the nature of magnetism - at the contact point of the affected object and the ground into which the Bolar current is discharged. |
| Technovelgy from Blood of the Moon,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1936 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the paralysis ray from Satellite Five (1938) by Arthur K. Barnes and the paralysis bomb from If This Goes On... (1940) by Robert Heinlein.
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'... an artificial intelligence equal to the human.'
'Rayno folded up the microterm and tucked it back inside his jumper.'
'Nemourlon armor of reasonable weight resists penetration by most fragments and any bullet that is not both reasonably heavy and fairly high-velocity.'
'Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile.'
'Its slack walls tightened, bulged, were crossed by ripples and waves of movement.'
'Norman... had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems.'
You will note that HG Wells also figured out the aspect ratio of the future!
'As though a switch had been turned off, the pain stopped...'
'At the ringside opposite them a table had been removed to make room for a large transparent plastic capsule on wheels.'
