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"The trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind."
- William Gibson
 |
| Ray gun | ||
| A weapon that projects a beam of destructive force. |
Earliest use of this phrase as far as I know.
| From the conical Ray guns on the enclosing walls swept sheets of blinding flame, a soundless cannonade that pecked at the interstices in the walls of the Temple and of the 293Airscouts’ Fortress, seeking for some unpainted spot between the blocks of stone, some small, abraded surface where the cold Rays might find lodgment. I heard the crumbling of disintegrating mortar and saw fragments of stone flying from cornice and pediment. Soon gaps would open and the whole splendid pile tumble into a heap of shapeless ruins.
The Rays flashed to and fro like brilliant lightning. |
| Technovelgy from The Messiah of the Cylinder,
by Victor Rousseau. Published by AC McClurg & Co. in 1917 Additional resources -
|
The secret of the Ray:
"It is a combustion by old light, stored solar energy being transmitted for that and all other power purposes from the great solar works on the Vosges Mountains. Its invention made the old warfare obsolete. Our small-arms are miniature Ray mirrors, charged with a single unit; our big ordnance is supplied from the Vosges by cable connection. The Ray destroys everything that it encounters, not protected by the glow paint which you may have observed on the fronts of our buildings."
Compare to the heat ray from War of the Worlds (1898) by HG Wells.
“What is this Ray?”
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
