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"Everything starts as somebody's daydream. And, when you're daydreaming, it is science fiction. It's when you start work out how you put it together, true science fiction becomes real science."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Stopper Bubble | ||
| Device that halts time within its boundaries. |
| "Well, what it look like, and what it feel like, is that time stops inside that stopper bubble, so that's what I call 'em."
"So, for all practical purposes..." Jubal thought about it. "Yeah, I squinched up real tight, me, and I turn on de stopper bubble, and as soon as I touch that button... dere I am wit' you guys, and I'm fallin'..." |
| Technovelgy from Red Lightning,
by John Varley. Published by Ace in 2006 Additional resources -
|
Here are a few more details:
"Stoppers," he said. "See, there ain't really no bubbles at all, no. I mean, they look like bubbles, so that's what I call 'em, but they really... the word the other folks use for 'em is superstrings, but that's stupid. They ain't strings and they ain't super."
"...the bubbles don't have no insides, see. They's not even really all here, the silvery part you see is just the part that sticks out from where they really are into where we really are."
"Well, time is different in 'em. Maybe time is zeroed out, I still haven't figgered out all the equations for that one."
Compare to the Slaver stasis field from Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld, the stasis box from Niven's 1968 story There is a Tide and the nullentropy bin from Frank Herbert's 1984 novel Heretics of Dune.
Thanks to reader Erik Glenn for mentioning this item in comments.
"...Jubal, tell me about the black bubbles. The... what did you call them?"
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| Can A Human Land A SpaceX Rocket On Its Tail? |
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'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
