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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Langston Field | ||
| A protective energy shield. |
A great defensive weapon. It felt very cold if you encountered it with some part of your body, since the very motion of the molecules would be slowed.
| The Langston Field absorbed energy; that was its basic function. It absorbed even the kinetic energy of expanding gas or radiation particles, with an efficiency proportional to the cube of the incoming velocities. In battle, the hellish fury of hydrogen torpedoes, and the concentrated photon energies of lasers, would strike the Field and be dispersed, absorbed, contained. As the energy levels increased, the Field would begin to glow, its absolute black becoming red, orange, yellow, climbing up the spectrum toward the violet. |
| Technovelgy from The Mote in God's Eye,
by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle). Published by Simon & Schuster in 1974 Additional resources -
|
Since the energy field tended to form in a circle around the generator, cities that protected themselves with Langston Fields were circular.
The Langston field is based on energy fields in E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series from the 1940's. It might be most directly related to the Lanson Screen from the 1936 story of the same name by Leo Zagat.
Compare to the shield from Skylark Three (1930) by EE 'Doc' Smith, the personal force shield from Foundation (1951) by Isaac Asimov and the deflector shield from Star Wars (1976) by George Lucas.
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
