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"People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research. I just enjoy reading the stuff, and some of it sticks in my mind and fits into the stories."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Paragravity | ||
| Artificial gravity. |
This is the first use of the term.
| Paragravity had burst the prison of a million years, to set men free of Earth.
Maxim-Gore, when he discovered paragravity, was merely seeking a selective force to extract the power isotope from native uranium. The force-fields of sunspots, hurling out jets of flaming hydrogen for hundreds of thousands of kilometers against solar radiation, gave him the clue to paragravity - a force existing in the unexplored region between the phenomena of magnetism and gravitation, and sharing some of the characteristics of each. ...the directional space drive; the negative safety field; the peegee reducer, that broke up compounds by direct selective attraction, yielding oxygen to breathe and iron for construction out of common hematite; the peegee terraforming unit, that held men and his precious blanket of air to any tiny rock - those were all unexpected gifts, amazing even the engineer. |
| Technovelgy from Collision Orbit,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding in 1942 Additional resources -
|
For the first use of the idea see artificial gravity from Brigands of the Moon (1930) by Ray Cummings. Published the same year was the artificial gravity system from Last and First Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon.
The most practical solution to the problem is provided in city of space from The Prince of Space by Williamson (this article also provides a quote from The Problem of Space Travel - The Rocket Motor, written by Herman Potočnik and published in 1928 in German).
Compare to the Chardion Field from Star of Dreams (1941), also by Williamson.
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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
