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"the [science fiction] writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true...and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you."
- Frederik Pohl

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.
Technovelgy 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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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Forever War
  More Ideas and Technology by Joe Haldeman
  Tech news articles related to The Forever War
  Tech news articles related to works by Joe Haldeman

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