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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
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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. |
| Technovelgy 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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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
