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"I never saw why I had to give up science in order to write, or the other way around, so I didn't!"
- Gregory Benford
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| Paragravity | ||
| Artificial gravity. |
This is the first use of the term.
| Paragravity had burst the prison of a million years, to set men free of Earth.
Maxim-Gore, when he discovered paragravity, was merely seeking a selective force to extract the power isotope from native uranium. The force-fields of sunspots, hurling out jets of flaming hydrogen for hundreds of thousands of kilometers against solar radiation, gave him the clue to paragravity - a force existing in the unexplored region between the phenomena of magnetism and gravitation, and sharing some of the characteristics of each. ...the directional space drive; the negative safety field; the peegee reducer, that broke up compounds by direct selective attraction, yielding oxygen to breathe and iron for construction out of common hematite; the peegee terraforming unit, that held men and his precious blanket of air to any tiny rock - those were all unexpected gifts, amazing even the engineer. |
| Technovelgy from Collision Orbit,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding in 1942 Additional resources -
|
For the first use of the idea see artificial gravity from Brigands of the Moon (1930) by Ray Cummings. Published the same year was the artificial gravity system from Last and First Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon.
The most practical solution to the problem is provided in city of space from The Prince of Space by Williamson (this article also provides a quote from The Problem of Space Travel - The Rocket Motor, written by Herman Potočnik and published in 1928 in German).
Compare to the Chardion Field from Star of Dreams (1941), also by Williamson.
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'The peculiar quality of this light, which gave it its great preeminence over all other penetrating rays...'
'The overworked leg motor would have to cool down before he could work on it...'
‘Where to, sport?’ the starter at cab relay asked.
This is nothing new for science fiction fans!
'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
