Matter. It's the stuff things are made of. You're made of matter. Your computer is made of matter. This very wiki is made of matter (well, the servers it's stored on are, anyway).
Matter also operates under certain rules that say that things (barring certain radioactive elements) don't spontaneously transform from one thing to another. If you've ever worried about spontaneously transforming into a giant pile of cherry ice cream while sitting at your keyboard, relax: the odds of such an event happening are vanishingly slim, as are the odds of your keyboard transforming into a nest of live pythons or the ceiling over your head turning into cheddar cheese and falling on you.
Those of us who like to sleep at night find security in those rules. Those of us who want to build things faster find them a nuisance. Turning an ore-rich mountainside into next year's model of automobile or a tree farm into enough copies of
Time magazine to fill everyone's subscriptions takes a lot of time and energy; wouldn't it be better if you could just take a big pile of
stuff, break it down into the very building blocks of matter and reconstruct it into all those wonderful big complex things?
Works of
Speculative Fiction like to take that "if" and make it a reality. Enter the
Matter Replicator, a form of
Applied Phlebotinum that gleefully ignores the laws of thermodynamics as it reassembles matter to do everything from
fixing a radio to
fixing a nice cup of Earl Grey.
Note that the name "
Matter Replicator" is itself somewhat misleading; it's rare to find one that can actually make something out of nothing (the one law of thermodynamics that usually can't be broken without breaking
Willing Suspension Of Disbelief as well). A
Matter Replicator uses
pre-existing matter to replicate something else, or perhaps even construct something entirely new. Creations made of
Hard Light need not apply here.
Examples
Anime & Manga
- In Fullmetal Alchemist, Alchemists are basically walking Matter Replicators. While most Alchemists specialize in a particular kind of transformation, it's implied that with the right transmutation circle, an Alchemist can do practically anything...except, of course, resurrect the dead. Seriously, it's a bad idea to even try it.
- Bokurano explores this trope quite a bit, due to the giant robots regenerating and the teleporting. Dungbeetle explains that all matter is made up of building blocks with four switches, which he can alter at will, making different things. Conservation of mass still applies, however, and Dungbeetle never creates anything out of thin air, stating that the energy difference would be too great. He uses it to teleport things instead.
- Naru Taru has mons with the ability to replicate anything they see. Whether this is unlimited is questioned, but it is never explored in-depth.
Comics
Film
Literature
- Robert Heinlein's Future History timeline included a "Universal Pantograph" which could duplicate objects. It's mentioned in Time Enough For Love.
- In the Vorkosigan Saga there are replicators for organic material, but it's implied that traditional manufacturing is easier for metals.
- William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties has the Nanofax machine, which transmits copies of anything.
- The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson pretty much revolves around this trope.
- In Wil McCarthy's The Queendom of Sol series, fax machines can print copies of almost any object, as long as enough raw materials are on hand. These devices are a relatively rare example in that they can also print copies of people — potentially multiple copies, which factors into the setting's society and laws. Combined with a solar-system-wide computer network, the faxes are effectively a form of transport, medical facility, factory, and glorified refrigerator all rolled into one. They are also one of the few valuable objects in the setting's economy, as the print plate of a fax machine is one of the very few things that another fax cannot produce.
Live Action TV
- Star Trek The Next Generation has food replicators as a staple of shipboard life. There are also medical replicators that can produce replacement body parts and organs (including an entire replacement spine).
- In the Twilight Zone episode "Valley of the Shadow", the inhabitants of the titular valley have advanced technology including a machine that can create any solid object based on its molecular pattern.
- The more advanced races of the Stargate verse have them, but they don't show up very often.
- Farscape had an episode where a villain used a wrist mounted version to "twin" people.
Real Life
- The advent of 3D printing
has brought this trope incredibly close to reality. There are even 3D printers that are designed to be built by other 3D printers.
Tabletop Games
- Shadowrun features these, what with it being a melting pot of cyberpunk tropes and all.
- The ultimate superscience technology in GURPS: Ultra-Tech. They're balanced by truly massive power requirements that require "cosmic" energy sources to be economical.
Web Comics
