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"I did more research, and realized I almost would rather be a biologist than a writer, because there was incredible stuff going on!"
- Greg Bear
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| Time Line | ||
| The sequence of events leading up to, and past, this moment. |
First use of this idea, as far as I know.
| A Wittenberg disrupter tears atoms apart. The free electrons are shunted off into accumulators, where we get power for lighting, cooking, heating and so forth. The protons go into the proton analyzer, where the gravitons are ripped out of them and stored in a special type of spherical field. When we want to move the ship, the gravitons are released. They spread through the ship and everything in the ship. The natural place for a graviton is a proton. The gravitons rush for the protons–which are already saturated with 1846 gravitons. Gravitons are unable to remain free in three-dimensional space. They escape along the time line, into the past. |
| Technovelgy from Time Wants A Skeleton,
by Ross Rocklynne. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the the Dutch clock from The Clock That Went Backward (1881) by Edward Page Mitchell, the Anachronopete from El Anachronopete (1887) by Enrique Gaspar, precogs from The Minority Report (1956) by Philip K. Dick, the chronoscope from Legion of Time (1938) by Jack Williamson, and the time-telespectroscope from The Exile of Time (1931) by Ray Cummings.
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Tech news articles related to works by Ross Rocklynne
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| DNA Printed Book By Isaac Asimov Now Available |
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
