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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
 |
| Minus-Matter | ||
| Material that negates weight. |
How to reduce the weight of these great ships of metal?
| Menni took from his pocket a glass bottle containing a metallic liquid, which I took to be mercury. Strangely, however, this liquid, which
filled not more than a third of the container, was not at the bottom of the
bottle but in its upper part from just below the neck right up to the cork.
Menni turned the bottle upside down and the liquid flowed upward to the
bottom. He released the phial, and it hung suspended in midair. This was
incredible, but there could be no doubt that it was really true.
"This is an ordinary glass phial," Menni explained, "but it contains a liquid which is repelled by the bodies of the solar system. Just enough liquid has been poured in to counterbalance the weight of the bottle, so that they are weightless taken together. We construct all our flying machines on the same principle. They are made of ordinary materials, but they have a reservoir filled with the appropriate quantity of this minus- matter. All that remains is to give this entire weightless system the proper speed. The flying machines intended for use in Earth's atmosphere have simple electric motors and wings. Such craft are of course unsuited for interplanetary travel, where we employ an entirely different system, with which I shall familiarize you in more detail later." |
| From Red Star,
by Aleksandr Bogdanov. Published by St. Petersburg in 1908 Additional resources -
|
Minus-matter has various uses:
"After that it was easy to develop and implement technical applications for the discovery — first, flying machines for movement within the
atmosphere, and then vehicles for travel to other planets."
...Let us not forget that radioactive matter is not only used to give the etheronephs their enormous velocity. You know that our entire chemical industry is now based on these substances. We use them to manufacture minus-matter, without which the etheronephs and our countless aircraft are only heavy, useless boxes. It is impossible to discontinue such uses of active matter.
Compare to apergy from Across the Zodiac (1880) by Percy Greg.
"Our society is far ahead of the academic world in many important
scientific questions. We knew about radioactive elements and their decay long before Curie and Ramsay, and our analysis of the structure of matter has come much further than theirs. We foresaw the possible existence of elements that are repelled by the planetary bodies and subsequently succeeded in synthesizing this minus-matter, as we briefly designate it.
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'The world ... is drenched in unfamiliar information all the way to the horizon.'
'He saw one hiss by him as he rounded the corner, trailing a short whip antenna...'
'It may be organic damage. It may be permanent. Time'll tell, and only after you are off Substance D for a long while.'
It's the polite thing to do, and has been the polite thing to do for about four generations.
