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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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| Barytrine Field | ||
| Very large scale stasis field. |
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Earth was demolished because it stood in the way of galactic progress. The superintelligent race in Troubled Star, however, was a bit nicer; they offered to tow the Earth to a new star.
| "...We put a barytrine field around Earth and tow the planet to some star similar to Sol. The barytrine field is a sort of time stasis - we don't know all about them yet but we're learning - which will make it seem as though there was a sudden cosmic wink...
"...You won't notice it. We've got maybe a half-dozen planets in the barytrine field right now... It stops all time - not dead-still but damned near... I assure you that if you drop a marble just before the barytrine field goes on , it will land after the field is off and you will have traversed a thousand years." |
| Technovelgy from Troubled Star,
by George O. Smith. Published by Better Publications in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Compare this item to the Slaver stasis field from Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld and the nullentropy bin from Frank Herbert's 1984 novel Heretics of Dune.
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