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"One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Personal Force-Shield | ||
| A portable force-shield small enough to be carried by a single man. |
In this excerpt, Hober Mallow, Foundation Trader, talks with patrician Onum Barr.
| "Listen!" There was a feverish edge to the old man's voice. "I knew you when you entered. You have a force-shield about your body, or had when I first saw you."
Doubtful silence, then, "Yes, –I had." "Good. That was a flaw, but you didn't know that. There are some things I know. It's out of fashion in these decaying times to be a scholar. Events race and flash past and who cannot fight the tide with nuclear-blast in hand is swept away, as I was. But I was a scholar, and I know that in all the history of nucleics, no portable force-shield was ever invented. We have force-shields – huge, lumbering powerhouses that will protect a city, or even a ship, but not one, single man."
 (Personal Shield from 'Big and Little [Foundation]' by Isaac Asimov) "Ah?" Mallow's underlip thrust out. "And what do you deduce from that?" "There have been stories percolating through space. They travel strange paths and become distorted with every parsec, –but when I was young there was a small ship of strange men, who did not know our customs and could not tell where they came from. They talked of magicians at the edge of the Galaxy; magicians who glowed in the darkness, who flew unaided through the air, and whom weapons would not touch. |
| Technovelgy from Foundation,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1951 Additional resources -
|
This is a very early reference to this idea. Consider the personal protective-shield from Triplanetary, written by E.E. "Doc" Smith in 1948.
Compare to the shield from Skylark Three (1930) by EE 'Doc' Smith, the Langston field from The Mote in God's Eye (1974) by Niven and Pournelle and the deflector shield from Star Wars (1976) by George Lucas.
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
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Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
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'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
