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"Writing about the future, I have a vested interest in there being a future for me to write about."
- John Brunner
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| Rhennius Machine | ||
| Device of alien manufacture, which will reverse, or turn inside out, any object passed through its mobilator. |
The Rhennius Machine was obtained in a sort of cultural exchange system. Once the Earth was admitted to a loose collection of planetary civilizations, the Earth participated in a system that improved cultural ties by exchanging artifacts of value in a sort of traveling exhibit. Since these items might be from civilizations that were vastly different, the purpose of the artifacts were typically unclear.
| Beside/below me, where I dangled but a couple of feet above the floor, hummed the Rhennius machine: three jet-black housings set in a line on a circular platform that rotated slowly in a counterclockwise direction, the end units each extruding a shaft - one vertical, one horizontal- about which passed what appeared to be a Moebius strip of belt almost a meter in width. |
| Technovelgy from Doorways in the Sand,
by Roger Zelazny. Published by Harper Science Fiction in 1976 Additional resources -
|
The Rhennius Machine turns out to have a very necessary effect; it is a great plot device. One of the effects of the Rhennius Machine is that it can reverse (replace with a mirror image) every molecule in any object passed through it's mobilator. Including people. People with an interest in organic chemistry will have a lot of fun with the extensive material on what it's like to be reversed from a first person point of view.
Wells also described this idea in 1896 in The Plattner Story:
To put the thing in technical language, the curious inversion of Plattner's right and left sides is proof that he has moved out of our space into what is called the Fourth Dimension, and that he has returned again to our world.
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'Our planes are going to start bringing in bales of discarded plastics...'
'... completely forgetting the ship at sight of the awesome figure and great head of the giant Gaut...'
'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
