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"What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger."
- William Gibson
 |
| Cushion Fence | ||
| Gentle force field |
Just a little push back. Unless you insisted.
| Now it was nine thousand square miles of paradise. It suggested a fantastic image to me; a shattered rainbow of odd-shaped fields of poppies glowing red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The channels had been roofed over with tile. The lake bed was scattered with wickiups, the traditional Indian hut, once made of mud and branches, but these were built of marble, granite, limestone, terracotta, travertine. Flagged roads wandered everywhere in no particular pattern, and all around the lake bed was a gentle cushion fence that pushed you back if you came too close. If you persisted in coming closer it stiff-armed you with a piston jolt. |
| Technovelgy from The Computer Connection,
by Alfred Bester. Published by Berkeley Publishing in 1974 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the barrier force field from Coventry (1940) by Robert Heinlein.
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| Harvest Power From Tears And Blinking With Smart Contact Lens |
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'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
