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"If I had to get a new Ph.D. now, I'd get it in polymer engineering - the manipulation of matter."
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![]() Read an early example of this specialized kind of force field. This is the first instance of the term "tractor beam."
The same device is used in Triplanetary:
"What do you make of that, Costigan?" asked the captain. "Tractor beams?"
"Apparently. They've got something like that. They're taking us somewhere fast. I'll go get a couple of Standishes, and another suit of armor - we'd better dig in," - and soon the small room became a veritable fortress...
Although Smith certainly won the naming convention, Edmond Hamilton wrote about essentially the same thing three years earlier in Crashing Suns - the attractive ray.
Other examples of force fields in sf include the barrier force field fence from Robert Heinlein's 1940 novella Coventry and the force-field penknife from Isaac Asimov's 1951 novel Foundation (probably the basis for George Lucas' light saber from Star Wars). Comment/Join this discussion ( 1 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
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'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
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