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"I don't know why I write science fiction. The voices in my head told me to!"
- Charles Stross
 |
| Pressor Field | ||
| A force field that pressed against anything that encountered it. |
| I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside. |
| From The Forever War,
by Joe Haldeman. Published by Not Known in 1974 Additional resources -
|
As far as I know, the first reference to such a field was the pressor beam from Gray Lensman, the 1942 novel by E.E. 'Doc' Smith.
A similar idea for a similar purpose is the sonabarrier from Frank Herbert's 1977 novel The Dosadi Experiment.
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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
