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"I went back to science fiction to try a few experiments …and my first experiment was a disaster…"
- Alfred Bester
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| Wall in the Air | ||
| An invisible barrier that protects an entire island or city. |
As far as I know, this is the earliest example of this idea in science fiction.
| They only could tell us that they had been taught from the Sun Island, a far-off land of the sea. Sometimes, they said, the tide was low and we could walk on dry rocks to the isle. Sometimes there was a “wall in the air.” Then no one could get there...
“That is the Sun Island. The angel-man lives there.”
Before the bird people slept he ordered the construction of a small, strong stone house, with two great cellars stored with fuel, food and oil. This was built as near the island as possible. The glow of brightness made continual day around it, but warmth hardly penetrated the impassable wall in the air... “This day only the wall in the air is removed. The bird people are asleep. I can take you there quickly!” |
| Technovelgy from Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star,
by Florence Carpenter Dieudonné. Published by Not Known in 1887 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the lanson screen from The Lanson Screen (1936) by Leo Zagat, the spindizzy from Cities in Flight (1957) by James Blish, the langston field from The Mote in God's Eye (1974) by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle) and the bobble from The Peace War (1984) by Vernor Vinge.
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and Technology from Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
