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"Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful."
- Philip K. Dick
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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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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
