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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven

Pressor Field  
  A force field that pressed against anything that encountered it.  

I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.
Technovelgy from The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman.
Published by Not Known in 1974
Additional resources -

As far as I know, the first reference to such a field was the pressor beam from Gray Lensman, the 1942 novel by E.E. 'Doc' Smith.

A similar idea for a similar purpose is the sonabarrier from Frank Herbert's 1977 novel The Dosadi Experiment.

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  More Ideas and Technology from The Forever War
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