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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner

Negative Safety-Field  
  A paragravity-based shield for space craft.  

"Only the particles with freak velocities can touch us," Drake went on. "We have a negative safety-field, that will stop everything under ten kilometers a second, and deflect a good deal of the rest."

The ugly face of Biggs showed a stubborn disbelief, and he tried to explain: "You can feel the peegee [paragravity] field, here in the ship, that holds you against the deck and keeps you from being space-sick? Well, there's a similar field around the hull, pushing away - you couldn't hit us with a rifle from fifty meters."

Technovelgy from Collision Orbit, by Jack Williamson.
Published by Astounding in 1942
Additional resources -

Compare to the force field from Islands of Space (1931) by John W. Campbell and the Langston field from Niven and Pournelle's 1974 classic The Mote in God's Eye.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Collision Orbit
  More Ideas and Technology by Jack Williamson
  Tech news articles related to Collision Orbit
  Tech news articles related to works by Jack Williamson

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