---
title: "Field propulsion"
chunk: 5/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_propulsion"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:55:18.670066+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Field propulsion concepts have appeared across literature, film, and television, in many cases predating or paralleling the technical development of the technologies and theories described in this article. Several fictional propulsion systems bear recognizable resemblances to environment-coupled, electromagnetic, or spacetime-interaction concepts later studied in aerospace research.
Fictional antigravity and photon-propulsion ideas emerged well before the underlying physics was formalized. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction traces fictional gravity counteraction from Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), through George Tucker's A Voyage to the Moon (1827) and its antigravity metal "lunarium," to Percy Greg's coinage of "apergy" as an antigravity spacecraft propulsion force in Across the Zodiac (1880). The earliest of these treated the concept in quasi-scientific rather than purely magical terms. A more direct link between fiction and physics appeared in Aventures extraordinaires d'un savant russe (The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist, 1888–1896) by Georges Le Faure and Henry de Graffigny, which featured photon-propelled mirror spacecraft; Colin R. McInnes noted in his 1999 book Solar Sailing that the story may have been inspired by James Clerk Maxwell's 1873 research into radiation pressure, an early forebear of field propulsion.
As technical rocketry advanced in the early 20th century, pulp fiction kept pace with its own propulsion inventions. H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901) popularized gravity shielding through "cavorite," a material used to construct a sphere capable of leaving Earth without expelling propellant. Similar ideas proliferated across the pulp era: Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series, beginning with A Princess of Mars (serialized 1912), described Martian airships propelled by a stored "eighth ray" used for lift and maneuvering rather than aerodynamic wings or rocket thrust, while Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan (1928) described "repellor anti-gravity rays" used as "legs" for airships, alongside "inertron," a substance that reacts to gravity opposite to normal matter. The Buck Rogers comic strip, launched in 1929, carried Nowlan's repulsor-beam and inertron concepts into the visual medium. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credited E. E. Smith's Spacehounds of IPC (1931) as containing the first use of the term "force field" in science fiction.
By mid-century, science fiction was moving beyond individual gadgets toward propulsion concepts with explicit theoretical rationales. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction attributes early use of "space warp" and "hyperspace" terminology in the context of interstellar travel to John W. Campbell's Islands of Space (serialized 1931 in Amazing Stories Quarterly; published as a novel in 1957). James Blish's Cities in Flight series, beginning with "Bindlestiff" (December 1950, Astounding Science Fiction), introduced the "spindizzy," formally the Dillon-Wagoner Graviton Polarity Generator. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction described the spindizzy as, in its day, "one of the best-loved items of sf Terminology," and noted that Blish gave the device a rationale rooted in theoretical physics, in which gravity fields are generated or cancelled by rotation owing to a fictional "Blackett-Dirac effect." The National Air and Space Museum identified Forbidden Planet (1956) as the first film to depict a faster-than-light starship built by humans; Time (magazine) described the starship's propulsion as a "quanto-gravitetic hyperdrive," and the published screenplay text includes the same phrasing in its opening narration.
Fiction magazines of this era also served as platforms for promoting claimed real-world propulsion devices. The Dean drive, a claimed reactionless device built by Norman L. Dean, received extensive promotion from John W. Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction beginning in 1960. Campbell published photographs of the device operating on a bathroom scale, and the June 1960 cover of Astounding featured a painting of a United States submarine near Mars supposedly propelled by a Dean drive. In 1984, physicist Amit Goswami wrote that the Dean drive had become so embedded in genre consciousness that "it is now customary in SF circles to refer to a reactionless drive as a Dean drive." Cordwainer Smith's "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" (Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1960) is among the earliest clearly sourced fictional treatments of photon-pressure sailing as a spacecraft propulsion method. The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction catalogued antigravity, the Dean drive, inertialess drive, sails, and spindizzy as distinct propulsion categories for space travel in the genre.
The influence between fiction and field propulsion research became most visible through television. Star Trek: The Original Series (premiered September 8, 1966) made "warp drive" and "tractor beam" household terms. In addition to popularizing the concept of warp drives, the Star Trek franchise was recognized by the Space Frontier Foundation for their portrayal of solar sail technologies in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Explorers", where astronauts construct and fly a lightsail ship. Star Trek would later introduce a biologically mediated propulsion system with Star Trek: Discovery's spore drive, which uses a subspace fungal network for instantaneous travel. Physicist Miguel Alcubierre stated that his 1994 theoretical warp metric, a solution formulated within general relativity describing the expansion of spacetime behind and contraction in front of a theoretical spacecraft, was directly inspired by the terminology used in Star Trek; The Planetary Society described him as having developed the model "inspired by Star Trek." Alcubierre's warp metric remains one of the clearest documented cases in which a science fiction concept directly catalyzed formal physics research into field propulsion.