Conference noted::sf

Alexis Gilliand had a nice anti-missile defense in one of his 
Rosinante books.  The inhabitants of the space colony Rosinante 
detected a nuclear-tipped missile coming their way, and used the 
wreckage of the power mirrors of a sister colony to build a giant 
screen in space, 10 km on a side.  The missile hit it at 10 miles per 
second, and that was the end of it.

I've also always liked Larry Niven's earplugs: stuff a wad of totally 
sound-proof material in your ears with a little radio transmitter on 
the outside and a matching receiver on the inside.  Talk of 
short-range transmitters...

/jlr

    I invented some stuff called "macrometal" for a science fiction
    role playing game.  Normal metals consist of lots of tiny crystals;
    macrometals consist of one big, fat, perfect (or nearly) crystal.
    Very brittle, very rigid, and very VERY strong.  It had many
    construction uses, but it also made dandy armor against missile
    attack.
    
    Re .1
    
    What were the ear-plugs supposed to defend you against?  Something
    acoustic, I presume.  Did Niven try to get by the fact that sound can
    penetrate bone and flesh, and thus attack from the rear, so to speak?
    
    Earl Wajenberg
                  

    You never found out exactly what they did, but I've always loved
    "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons".
    
    Tamzen

    re single crystal metal works - the Scientific American materials
    issue included an article on such materials - high performance turbine
    blades are now cast as single crystals.
    
    re Cordwainer Smith (a nom de plume which apparently means something
    like "wood stacking metal worker"), he uses cats as a defense in
    another of his stories, one of my favorites, "The Crime and Glory
    of Commander Suzdal" (sp?), which Commander breeds a race of
    fanatically devoted (to Man) warrior cats (shades of Larry Niven's
    Kzin (Kzinti? which is the plural, which is the adjective?)) whom
    he throws back in time to defend Man from some alien menace.  I
    think he (Mr. Smith) also uses cats in "The Game of Cat and Mouse".
    And of course, cats show up in numerous stories as underpeople,
    e.g., "The Ballad of the Lost C'mell".
    
    len.
    

  Yeah, the pinlighters were cats but wasn't the story called "The Game
  of Rat and Dragon"?

  JP

    Indeed, that sounds much more like it now that you mention it.  I'll
    look it up when I get home.  Probably time to reread some Smith
    again anyway.  I think my neurons could use some ECC.
    
    len.
    

    As it happens, Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons weren't cats; they
    were weasels, or maybe mink.  They had been bred for psychotic fury
    (not very hard in weasels).  They then provided the output for a
    telepathic projector trained on incoming enemy spacecraft.  At least
    that's what I recall; it's been years since I read it.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    Speaking of Smiths:
    
    Doc Smith's "polycyclic force fields," in the Lenmsman books.  They'd
    block out harmful radiation and some ballistic stuff, but weould
    allow you to communicate and see out.
    
    Also, thought screens (the baddies got 'em from Ploor.  The Eddorians
    finally made better ones).
    
    John W. Campbell's "resistium" -- an ultra-element using
    antiproton/antineutron nuclei and orbiting protons (!).  Made an
    almost impervious hull for spacecraft. (Dunno howcome the orbiting
    protons didn't interact with normal-matter electrons, though.)
    
    In another John Campbell story, the Hall Effect Bullet Deflector.
    This was a force-field that trapped bullets in it.  Problem was
    that while it protected the person wearing it, that person quickly
    became surrounded by orbiting bullets. [Really!]
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    
    
    

    In James Blish's "Cities in Flight" series, there was an emergency
    escape you could make by deliberately and carefully overdriving
    the spindizzies.  (Spindizzies were the gravity engines that moved
    the cities both above and below light speed.)  When overdriven,
    the spindizzies teleported the whole city to a random location.
    There may have been an intermediate stop in nowhere at all.  As
    I recall, the mayor/captain of New York counted himself very lucky
    to remain in the Milky Way.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

re: Cordwainer Smith

A cordwainer is an archaic term for a shoemaker.  It has a remote 
derivation from cordovan leather.  Harlan Ellsion liked it so much 
that he used it one of his own pseudonyms: Cordwainer Bird, creator 
of "Starlost".  It must appear in the Book of the New Sun somewhere...

/jlr

    RE: -1
    
    Just a slight clarification. When you see Ellison use the pseudonym,
    "Cordwainer Bird," for anything, you can be certain that he has
    disavowed whatever project that name is attached to - especially
    "The Starlost." It's Ellison's ungentle way of warning off fans
    and to flip the bird at whoever he feels has messed him over. 
    
    Fred

    The personal forcefields portrayed in Dune were interesting.
    Remember, the ones that stop the fast blow but passed the slow one.
    
    /Dan
    

    re .12:  There are a number of those kind of critters around.  Niven
    and Pournelle's Langston field and (gosh who is it!)'s field in
    The Forever War.  The latter required you to fight with swords etc
    since anything faster would get either slowed down or deflected.
    
    Did Asimov's force field work that way in Foundation and Empire
    too?
    
    Burns
    

    And who can forget General Product hulls.  (Niven's Pierson's
    Puppeteers made them).  They block any kind of radiation except
    that which customer's could sense.  (Yipes!  Does any customer see
    with high energy X-rays?)  They also did not block gravity, and
    anti-matter did not help their strength any.
    
    Burns

    
    A couple more interesting ones from Cordwainer Smith:
    
    The details are hazy on this one, but when No-space was first discov-
    ered, the radiation would...kill? drive insane?...anyone traveling
    in it. The answer was to put a false hull on the No-ships and fill
    it with oyster spawn to absorb the lethal No-space fields. Sorta
    harsh on the oysters, though...
    
    Then there was The Golden Ship--a couple light-minutes worth of
    wire and sheet metal, shaped like a HUGE warship. All it had to
    do was show up once and scare the bejesus out of the Bright Empire...
    It was so secret that after its single mission, they wiped the brain
    of the captain, and he spent the rest of his life wondering why
    he was a hero...
    
    Ed E.

    re .13, Forever War, by Joe Haldemann.
    
    I have a vague recollection of a book called DeathWorld by Haldemann
    that involved some ferocious sort of bodyarmor.  Anyone have a better
    memory than me on this?
    
    /Dan

    Re .16
    
    Sure it wasn't Harry Harrison?  He wrote of an Earth colony on a
    planet with ferocious wildlife.  I believe the colonists developed
    some highly aggressive armor, including a gun-and-holster combination
    that slapped the gun into your hand when you moved your fingers
    into the right position to grip the gun.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    I think you got me Earl.  It was Deathworld by Harry Harrison.
    It was a pretty entertaining book as I remember.  
    
    /Dan

    Actually a trilogy as I recall.
    
    len,.
    

    Consisting of DEATHWORLD, THE ETHICAL ENGINEER (weak), and THE HORSE
    BARBARIANS.  D is good, THB is better.
    
    Seems to me I have a spare copy of the Trilogy from the SFBC....
    
    				Don ICEMAN::Rudman

    re:.20
    
    Those were the titles of the ANALOG serializations. The books
    had the highly creative titles DEATHWORLD, DEATHWORLD 2, and
    DEATHWORLD 3.
    
    --- jerry

    True.  After Analog I managed to find all 3 DEATH P-backs as well
    as the Trilogy.
    
    I figured the reading populace would see the connection if they run
    across a book with DEATHWORLD in the title.
    
    					Don