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"By the time I can take people out to where Hubble is looking, they won't be human anymore, by a long way."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Stopper Bubble | ||
| Device that halts time within its boundaries. |
| "Well, what it look like, and what it feel like, is that time stops inside that stopper bubble, so that's what I call 'em."
"So, for all practical purposes..." Jubal thought about it. "Yeah, I squinched up real tight, me, and I turn on de stopper bubble, and as soon as I touch that button... dere I am wit' you guys, and I'm fallin'..." |
| Technovelgy from Red Lightning,
by John Varley. Published by Ace in 2006 Additional resources -
|
Here are a few more details:
"Stoppers," he said. "See, there ain't really no bubbles at all, no. I mean, they look like bubbles, so that's what I call 'em, but they really... the word the other folks use for 'em is superstrings, but that's stupid. They ain't strings and they ain't super."
"...the bubbles don't have no insides, see. They's not even really all here, the silvery part you see is just the part that sticks out from where they really are into where we really are."
"Well, time is different in 'em. Maybe time is zeroed out, I still haven't figgered out all the equations for that one."
Compare to the Slaver stasis field from Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld, the stasis box from Niven's 1968 story There is a Tide and the nullentropy bin from Frank Herbert's 1984 novel Heretics of Dune.
Thanks to reader Erik Glenn for mentioning this item in comments.
"...Jubal, tell me about the black bubbles. The... what did you call them?"
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'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
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'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
