From: alien@acheron.amigans.gen.nz (Ross Smith)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science
Subject: Re:  Sci-Fantasy Weapons (Was: Re: Weapons systems?)
Date: 18 Nov 92 21:21:36 GMT+12
Distribution: world
Organization: Wanganui Amigans, Wanganui, NZ

In article <1992Nov16.101945.24701@crc.ac.uk> gwilliam@crc.ac.uk (Gary Williams x3294) writes:
>
>Then, of course, there is the whole subject of accidents of history and
>sneaky tricks that can be played to sucker the enemy into destroying
>themselves - so much more satisfying!
>
>I'm thinking of things like (can't remember the author Clarke, Asimov?)
>(can't remember many details) the short story where side number one
>withdraws from a ancient half-built time-machine which side two gets
>going only to discover too late that nature always rearranges history so
>that the time-machine never gets to work (side two knew this but didn't
>reckon on nature stopping the time-machine from being built by causing
>their own sun to go nova).

The story is "Rotating Cylinders and the Possilibilty of Global Causality
Violation" (pauses to catch breath :-) by Larry Niven. It's in his collection
"Convergent Series", I think.


Sneaky tricks to sucker the enemy into destroying themselves ...

(*** SPOILER WARNING for several stories & novels ***)






John Wyndham's "The Trojan Beam" (1930s, I think) describes a war in which one
side invents a directed magnetic beam that can pull bombers out of the sky.
They arrange for the secret to be leaked to the other side, along with the
news that they're planning a massive air raid on a certain night. So the enemy
build lots of these magnetic beams and wave them around in their own airspace
... on the night of a major meteor shower.

In David Langford's novel "The Space Eater" (highly recommended, BTW), a
future Earth discovers that a colony world is experimenting with "anomalous
physics", a set of peculiar phenomena that can produce useful effects like
teleportation, and not-so-useful effects like tearing the fabric of spacetime
apart on a planetary scale. So they send an agent to warn them to stop messing
about ... oh, and whatever you do, please don't look inside this matter
transmitter he brought with him, or try to copy the circuitry, will you?

There was a story by Philip K Dick, I forget the title, in which aliens want
to take over Earth's economy. So they invent a highly addictive game like
Monopoly, but in which the object is to go broke first. Soon all of Earth's
children are learning how much fun it is to lose money...

In Eric Frank Russell's story "The Mechanical Mice", an inventor comes up with
a device that lets him send his mind into the future, and uses it to make
money by stealing future inventions and claiming them for his own. But on one
trip he goes way into the future, to a time when humans are extinct and
self-reproducing machines rule. From them he gets the plans for something, he
doesn't know what -- but it turns out they gave him the plans for one of
themselves, a machine that could take over the world, knowing that he'd be
unable to resist building the mysterious device just to see what it does...


--
...... Ross Smith (Wanganui, NZ) ...... alien@acheron.amigans.gen.nz ......
   Mine is the ship bound for Alpha Centauri
   We must be out of our minds
   For though we are shipmates bound for tomorrow
   Everyone here's flying blind                          (Crystal Gayle)
--

Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science