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"[Science fiction is] anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out."
- Gregory Benford
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| Drop Shaft (Neutralization of Inertia) | ||
| An 'elevator shaft' in which the user can fall at the speed of gravity, then be stopped without inertia (i.e., instantly). |
Cadets in formation descend the full ninety stories of Wentworth Hall using an unusual elevator. Just the shaft of the elevator is used - and a device to neutralize inertia.
| In perfect alignment and cadence the little column marched down the hall. In their path yawned the shaft - a vertical pit some twenty feet square extending from Main floor to roof of the hall; more than a thousand feet of sheer air, cleared of all traffic by flaring red lights...
Dropping with a velocity of over two thousand feet per second though they were at the instant of impact, yet those five husky bodies came from full speed to an instantaneous, shockless, effortless halt at contact, for the drop had been made under complete neutralization of inertia - 'free' in space parlance. |
| Technovelgy from Galactic Patrol,
by E.E. 'Doc' Smith. Published by Street and Smith in 1937 Additional resources -
|
Inertia is a difficult property of matter to get around. As Isaac Newton wrote "The vis insita, or innate force of matter is a power of resisting, by which every body as much as in it lies, continues in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forwards in a right line."
Compare to dropshaft from Deeper than the Darkness (1957) by Harlan Ellison and bounce tube from Robert Heinlein's 1956 juvenile Double Star.
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'...they moved with the ease of dandelion puffs.'
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'These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern...'
'...the meteor caught and halted just as a small boy catches a swift ball in his cap.'
'We have decided that it shall be but one ship... it must contain everything needed to take us through the generations.'
'You’re the robopsychologist of the plant, so you’re to study the robot itself...'
