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"...the elements of cyberpunk have dissolved into the whole SF genre, so it’s hard to find anyone writing who doesn’t owe serious debts to Gibson and his crew."
- Richard Morgan
 |
| Zero-Time Jail | ||
| A building in which an energy field prevents time from passing. |
In this future world, an escape-proof prison is invented which requires no guards, dogs or razor wire to keep the prisoners in. Time itself is stopped; the prisoners don't age a day.
| "They learned my crime from my ship's log. They sentenced me to - " Untranslated. "What was that?" "They stopped time for me. There was a building where some criminals went to be stored against need." The bitter smile again: "I was to be flattered. Only unusual breakers of the law were thought to be of future need to the State. People of high intelligence or with good genes or interesting tales to tell future historians. The building would hold perhaps ten thousand, no more. I was lucky they let me keep my medicines. At that I could choose only as much as I could carry." |
| From A World Out of Time,
by Larry Niven. Published by Random House in 1976 Additional resources -
|
This is another solution to the problem of time travel; you stay "still" in time while the rest of the world progresses. Of course, it only works one way. A similar idea is used by Vernor Vinge in his wonderful novel, The Peace War.
You might also be interested in the null-entropy bin - the world's best salad crisper, from Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert.
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'A worker replaced by a nubot... had to be compensated.'
'... forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers.'
'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
