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"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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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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'Space-sickness is one of the most unpleasant sensations that a human being can experience. Not all are subject to it...'
'...I saw a nice black heavy-looking cloud sailing by just now, and I can get the electrical machine out in five minutes to draw it down.'
'From a distance it could resolve the cosmic rays reflected from various substances.'
'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
