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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Stasis Field | ||
| Energy field which prevents time from passing inside the field walls; no time passes, nobody gets hurt. |
Compare to the Slaver Stasis Field.
| "Suppose they do release the field?" one of the men present was saying. "What will it amount to? What will it contain? Some artifacts possibly, perhaps some records of the period in which it was set up. But nothing more than that. The notion that life could be preserved in it, unchanged, in absolute stasis, for several centuries is preposterous."
"How do you know? It's certain that they thought they had found a way of suspending, uh, shall we say freezing entropy. The instructions with the field are perfectly plain." Monroe-Alpha began to understand what they were talking about. It was the so-called Adirondack stasis field. It had been a three-day wonder when it was discovered, a generation earlier, in a remote part of the mountain from which it got its name. Not that the field itself was spectacular-it was simply an impenetrable area of total reflection, a cubical mirror. |
| From Beyond This Horizon,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Larry Niven used the phrase this way in There is a Tide:
The Tnuctipun-Slaver war had wiped out most of the intelligent species of the galaxy, a billion and a half years ago... Often the Slavers, losing a battle, had stored valuables in a stasis box and hidden it against the day they would again be of use.
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"We had leisure to make a thorough observation of the hidden side of earth's satellite."
'... iron tubes... the ends of the tubes were joined to each other...to preserve it from the action of the seawater.'
'Mr. Garden, you are in no condition to drive....'
'A cable, here, from the controller to the interface plug... wires from that to the brain.'
'The slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
'Holodeck 4 was waiting to be programmed...'
