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"The permanent government now is the anchorpeople. They don't get elected, and year after year they're responding emotionally to this or that."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Cushion Fence | ||
| Gentle force field |
Just a little push back. Unless you insisted.
| Now it was nine thousand square miles of paradise. It suggested a fantastic image to me; a shattered rainbow of odd-shaped fields of poppies glowing red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The channels had been roofed over with tile. The lake bed was scattered with wickiups, the traditional Indian hut, once made of mud and branches, but these were built of marble, granite, limestone, terracotta, travertine. Flagged roads wandered everywhere in no particular pattern, and all around the lake bed was a gentle cushion fence that pushed you back if you came too close. If you persisted in coming closer it stiff-armed you with a piston jolt. |
| Technovelgy from The Computer Connection,
by Alfred Bester. Published by Berkeley Publishing in 1974 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the barrier force field from Coventry (1940) by Robert Heinlein.
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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
