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"SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Rhennius Machine | ||
| Device of alien manufacture, which will reverse, or turn inside out, any object passed through its mobilator. |
The Rhennius Machine was obtained in a sort of cultural exchange system. Once the Earth was admitted to a loose collection of planetary civilizations, the Earth participated in a system that improved cultural ties by exchanging artifacts of value in a sort of traveling exhibit. Since these items might be from civilizations that were vastly different, the purpose of the artifacts were typically unclear.
| Beside/below me, where I dangled but a couple of feet above the floor, hummed the Rhennius machine: three jet-black housings set in a line on a circular platform that rotated slowly in a counterclockwise direction, the end units each extruding a shaft - one vertical, one horizontal- about which passed what appeared to be a Moebius strip of belt almost a meter in width. |
| Technovelgy from Doorways in the Sand,
by Roger Zelazny. Published by Harper Science Fiction in 1976 Additional resources -
|
The Rhennius Machine turns out to have a very necessary effect; it is a great plot device. One of the effects of the Rhennius Machine is that it can reverse (replace with a mirror image) every molecule in any object passed through it's mobilator. Including people. People with an interest in organic chemistry will have a lot of fun with the extensive material on what it's like to be reversed from a first person point of view.
Wells also described this idea in 1896 in The Plattner Story:
To put the thing in technical language, the curious inversion of Plattner's right and left sides is proof that he has moved out of our space into what is called the Fourth Dimension, and that he has returned again to our world.
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"The robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again...'
'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
