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"We are all repositories for genetically-encoded information that we're all spreading back and forth amongst each other, all the time. We're just lousy with information."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Stasis Field | ||
| Energy field which prevents time from passing inside the field walls; no time passes, nobody gets hurt. |
Compare to the Slaver Stasis Field.
| "Suppose they do release the field?" one of the men present was saying. "What will it amount to? What will it contain? Some artifacts possibly, perhaps some records of the period in which it was set up. But nothing more than that. The notion that life could be preserved in it, unchanged, in absolute stasis, for several centuries is preposterous."
"How do you know? It's certain that they thought they had found a way of suspending, uh, shall we say freezing entropy. The instructions with the field are perfectly plain." Monroe-Alpha began to understand what they were talking about. It was the so-called Adirondack stasis field. It had been a three-day wonder when it was discovered, a generation earlier, in a remote part of the mountain from which it got its name. Not that the field itself was spectacular-it was simply an impenetrable area of total reflection, a cubical mirror. |
| From Beyond This Horizon,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Larry Niven used the phrase this way in There is a Tide:
The Tnuctipun-Slaver war had wiped out most of the intelligent species of the galaxy, a billion and a half years ago... Often the Slavers, losing a battle, had stored valuables in a stasis box and hidden it against the day they would again be of use.
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'the registration number which the traffic control automatically photographed as she left the controlway...'
'It could maintain a steady six miles per hour...'
'Then they press one of these here thirteen buttons...'
'...without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule to injure the diseased atmosphere any further.'
'Bird-like robots now descended from the ceiling of the theatre...'
'The efficient robot waiter of the Sky Club had cleared away the remnants of an epicurean meal.'
'...in the tank the new body and the new mind and memory and life has taken almost instant form.'
'pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit...'
'The atmosphere yielded its moisture with reluctance. It had to be coaxed down...'
