Unobtainium / Literature

• Plattnerite from Stephen Baxter's The Time Machine sequel, The Time Ships, is an indeterminate, glowing green mineral that allows time travel. Its name and description are a Shout-Out to a character and material found in other Wells stories.
• Tom Swift had Tomasite. A super plastic, a 1 inch layer of it was better than a foot of lead at shielding a nuclear reactor.
• Harry Harrison:
  • The Fourth Law of Robotics: US Robotics has copyrighted the use of positronic brains, especially the use of platinum-iridium plating. The robots manufactured with the Fourth Law use a completely different style of construction; solid-state circuits, fiber optics, PROM, and RAM.
  • In his 1973 Golden Age SF spoof novel, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, there is Cheddite (a fuel created from cheese). The heroes' 747 jet is turned into a spacecraft by means of windows armored with armolite, vacuum insulation with insulite, fuel tanks filled with combustite, guns firing pellets of destructite, batteries replaced with capacitite and a space-warp drive powered by warpite.
• In the Spaceforce (2012) universe, ships' hyperdrives are powered by a crystal called garrium which is found on only a few planets in the known galaxy. It is so valuable that entire planetary economies are based on scooping up tiny fragments of it in tonnes of dust.
• Melange, also called spice, in the Dune novels, extends life and grants limited prescience, allowing Faster-Than-Light Travel. And it tastes like cinnamon. Oh, and there are other uses. If it seems like something that would be extremely valuable and important, that's because it is. It's generally thought to be an Alternate Company Equivalent to oil in the way that it drives the greater economy and is controlled by warlike tribes.
• The German SF/pulp series Perry Rhodan has over the course of its history collected a fair bit of unobtainium in various forms.
  • Classic examples are Ynkelonium, a metallic element that does not react with antimatter and can to an extent prevent such reactions from occurring in its immediate vicinity, and Luurs-Metal, which always maintains a constant temperature of about 3.4 degrees Celsius. Both materials occur naturally in the universe and cannot be synthesized.
  • That's only two of the many examples, the series frequently introducing new and exotic materials, practically whenever a new alien species is encountered. The wiki for the series alone consists of at least 150 entries for exotic materials and is by no means complete.
• Mithril in The Lord of the Rings, an incredibly strong and silvery metal mined by dwarves.
• Larry Niven's Ringworld has a few examples:
  • Scrith, the material used to make the titular megastructure. It is nearly frictionless, blocks almost all radiation (including 40% of neutrinos, which would take about a light-year thickness of lead) and has a tensile strength on the same order of magnitude as the strong nuclear force.
  • The unnamed substance the Puppeteers make General Products hulls out of. They're actually massive molecules big enough to live in.
• In the Star Wars universe we have: bacta, tibanna gas, transparisteel and durasteel (which itself is an alloy of carvanium, lommite, carbon, meleenium, neutronium, and zersium)... Well, let's say there are lots of interesting materials and substances in the Star Wars EU. Special mention goes to cortosis, which is lightsaber-resistant. Or in its purest form actually causes lightsabers to short out. Cortosis doesn't have a monopoly on the lightsaber-resisting properties: phrik, beskar (Mandalorian Iron), ultrachrome, and songsteel also boast that property. Mandalorian Iron and phrik are said to be even stronger to near Adamantium-like degrees, with a container made of phrik actually managing to stay intact after being on Alderaan when the planet was destroyed. Cortosis's ability to short out a lightsaber blade on contact, however, is unique to it alone. It's also literally unobtanium for most of the series - it was introduced for Knights of the Old Republic, where the question of how regular swords don't get chopped into two halves of a sword the instant a lightsaber hits them is that all of the melee weapons in the game have a "cortosis weave" to them to make them resistant to lightsabers. And, in turn, the question of why cortosis isn't around four-thousand years after when KotOR takes place is answered: they ran out of the stuff putting it into everything. By the time of the Darth Bane trilogy (about a thousand years before the movies) it's used even more (for instance in starship hulls), but the latest ongoing war with the Sith has started to dry up the supply. It is still around in the movie era, bit it's vanishingly rare and mostly forgotten.
• The Uplift Series by David Brin has a material of the name unobtainium.
• The hyperdrive of Kevin J. Anderson's The Saga of Seven Suns is fuelled by "ekti," described as "an allotropic isotope of hydrogen."
• Atium and Lerasium from the Mistborn books. Atium is only mined in one place, it's extremely rare, and incredibly powerful, because it allows an allomancer to see a few moments into the future, effectively making them nearly invincible in combat. While only a few nuggets of Lerasium appear to exist and anyone who ingests Lerasium will instantaneously become a mistborn. All of the properties of Atium and Lerasium are ultimately justified by them being made from the bodies of gods.
  • In Wax and Wayne, Atium and Lerasium are no more due to some shuffling in the godly domain, but on the other hand, there's Harmonium, or Ettmetal, a metal with properties similar to Caesium and has the ability to produce power for specially designed airships. Similarly treated, aeluminum, which is allomantically neutral, provides the justification for wearing a Tinfoil Hat, and is rare enough that it's worth more than gold (see the Real Life folder. Despite being one of the most common metals in the earth's crust, before refining processes were perfected it was immensely valuable).
• John Ringo's Looking Glass series is so named for the instantaneous transmission portals which were created by what were originally thought to be Higgs bosons. That identification was later corrected, and they were renamed Looking Glass Bosons. The looking glasses of the first book take a secondary role however, after the series takes off into space in a ship powered by a Black Box of alien origin, and when the ship is destroyed in the third book, it is entirely remade by an alien race the ship just saved. This leads to the fourth book where the captain of the ship discovers he is missing a large number of alien made spare parts and lampshades all of this saying, "And now I have to call SpaceCom and explain to them that we're non-mission-capable until a couple of tons of unobtainium parts and tools get found!"
• John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata series has an alien race able to produce materials with physical properties that the Earth scientists consider flatly impossible. It turns out that they do this by mentally altering the probability of chemical reactions, such that extremely unlikely reactions occur consistently enough to form new compounds that the Earth scientists and engineers cannot replicate.
• Practically every book in the old Danny Dunn children's sci-fi series starts out with the discovery of a new form of Unobtainium. Usually because Danny or a friend of his spilled something in the lab.
• Tanglestone from the Elizabeth Bear book, Undertow, was only found on the planet named Greene's World, and allowed instant data and material transportation across many light years from the colonies to Earth.
• In Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic and The Circle Opens series, there's living metal, which can only be gotten by one character, because it grows on her hand due to an accident involving fire and a staff with a metal top. Later she can make it faster by putting some in a jar and adding some of her blood to it, but she is still the only person who can make it, and thus the only one with consistent access to it.
• Rudyard Kipling's story The Night Mail has airships lifted by "Fleury's gas" energized by "Fleury's ray." The lifting power of the gas can apparently be rapidly adjusted, and is so great that airships are made rigid enough to achieve speeds of two hundred miles per hour without straining the hull or engines. (No real-world airship^note a lighter-than-air vessel, as distinct from an airplane, many of which have stall speeds above 100 mph has ever reached one hundred.)
• In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, industrialist Henry Rearden is introduced as a protagonist by way of his invention of "Rearden Metal," a somewhat vaguely-described alloy of steel and copper which is much stronger and cheaper to produce than industrial-grade steel.
  • It even started out the same way Unobtainium usually starts: as an engineers joke. Rearden was originally trying to design fantastic bridges; once he discovered that it was impossible with regular metal, he set out to make his own.
• Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle gives us the Solomonic gold, and Stephenson also goes into a long digression on wootz steel, which is actually real and pretty damn awesome to boot.
• Neal Stephenson's Anathem has a material called New Matter that has drastically different properties than regular matter. It is explicitly stated that it is an alternative chemistry created by rearranging subatomic particles. This is based on Real Life physics with Exotic Matter.
• E. E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark Series features several nonexistent wonder-metals, including Arenak for super-tough armor, and Metal X which can convert matter completely into energy when exposed to X-rays.
• Humanity's escape from the doomed planet earth in When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer is finally made possible when tides from the approaching planet tear open the earth, revealing the previously hypothetical wonder-metal needed for nuclear-powered space travel.
• Wil McCarthy's Queendom of Sol series has quantum dots, which can imitate the properties of ordinary matter as well as manifesting exotic attributes like perfect reflectivity and frictionlessness. He also wrote a non-fiction novel called Hacking Matter that talks about the real-world possibility of using them. So, unobtainium today, but maybe not tomorrow.
• Discworld subverts this trope with octiron, a fantastic metal that's really only useful as a substitute for spherical worlds' compass magnets (it points to the Hub). (Sourcery reveals you can also make a Magic Staff out of it, but that this is a really bad idea. There are also octiron bells that ring out audible silence; small ones are used in the Dark Morris, while a larger version is Old Tom in the Unseen University belltower). Played straight with sapient pearwood, which is to blame for the Luggage's animation and magical properties. Even that is subverted in that while the wood is so rare in the area most of the books are set that only a few small wands made of it exist, in the Counterweight Continent (where its original owner hails from) the stuff is so common that nobody even considers it unusual.
• Neal Asher's The Polity series has Chainglass, a material made from silicon chain molecules that can be made near-indestructible and sharp enough to slice through steel with ease. Chainglass is used instead of metal and plastic in most applications. It also made the inventor the richest man in the galaxy.
• Urim in L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero's Daughter trilogy. Warrior angels wear it. It can hold the Water of Life. A gauntlet made of Urim allows the wielding of the Staff of Decay without harm.
• The Sten series has Anti-Matter Two, the only energy source capable of generating enough power to run hyperspace engines and make interstellar travel feasible. In all the Universe there is only a single source of AM2, and only the Eternal Emperor knows where it is.
• In Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Heaven, common coal have rare "slow" and "fast" coal that slow or speed up time inside it. The Big Bad had hundreds of young girl slaves move hands over small pieces of coal and pick out those specific coal pieces.
• Animorphs made a brief mention of ramonite, the metal that makes up most spacecraft and gives it its properties of stretching open doorways and opaquing/clearing the viewports.
• In Raise the Titanic! by Clive Cussler, the US hatches a military plan requiring ultra-rare byzanium. The only known deposit, on a remote Russian Arctic island, had been mined out in the early 20th century, and the entire output shipped out on an ocean liner to the United States. Guess which one.
• Phlogiston in The Extraordinaires. It is a semi-magical substance that allows Time Machines and other Steampunk-ish gadgets beyond the realm of Edwardian science to function. Control of the supply of phlogiston is a powerful bargaining chip.
• Valyrian steel in A Song of Ice and Fire, which is possibly an Expy of Damascus steel. It is a magical alloy created in old Valyria, reputedly with the aid of spells and dragonfire in the forging, and Valyrian steel weapons are far superior to weapons made of ordinary steel. The secret of creating Valyrian steel was lost when Valyria fell, but especially skilled blacksmiths can reforge swords from existing Valyrian steel.
• A few Robert A. Heinlein stories reference "Shipstones". These are, basically, very very very good batteries. They're not actually unobtainable, as the Shipstone Corporation will be happy to lease (not sell) you one, but good luck getting one from any other source since their method of construction is secret and disassembling one to see how it works either gets you a non-working mess (if you're lucky) or dead (they tend to explode if taken apart).
• In H. P. Lovecraft's "In the Walls of Eryx," the "crystals" on Venus are super high-energy sources for humans, though they have some strange psychic/religious value to the native Venusians.
• Peter and the Starcatchers reimagined pixie dust as "starstuff", a mysterious substance that falls to earth every so often like a meteorite, and can be used to grant people the power of flight as well as heal and stop the aging process. A secret society known as the Starcatchers exists to guard its power from those who would seek to use it towards selfish ends. In the first book, a large quantity of it is accidentally released on an uncharted island, turning fish into mermaids, a bird into Tinker Bell, and the title character into a boy who can fly indefinitely and will never age.
• The Four Horsemen Universe: Fluorine-11 (usually just called F11), a fictional^note Fluorine's lightest recorded isotope is fluorine-14, which has a half-life in the yoctosecond range. rare isotope of fluorine, only found amid supernova remnants. It is necessary as a component for fusion reactors and is therefore extremely valuable, thus providing for No Blood for Phlebotinum plots.
• Honor Harrington has "battle steel", the material used in modern warship hulls, which is stronger than titanium (used in older warships, such as those of the pre-alliance Grayson Space Navy in The Honor of the Queen) and requires chem-catalyst welding. This one is actually not terribly outlandish, as it's explained to be a composite of metal alloys and ceramics, and warship hulls as used in the Honorverse would be a good application (among other things, cermets combine the temperature resistance of ceramics with metals' ability to deform rather than shatter).
• The Reunion With Twelve Fascinating Goddesses has Etherium, a rare and powerful alloy created from compressing high-quality ether. It is extremely compatible with Spirits and makes an ideal medium for them. However, Etherium production is small and working it is impossible for humans as this causes it to lose its special properties. There is exactly one Etherium weapon in existence, Tooi's sword Zodiac, which was created by the goddesses.
• Priscilla Hutchins: In Deepsix, a human expedition is surprised to find a very long Big Dumb Object orbiting a planet with an abandoned civilization. They eventually work out that it's the remains of a Space Elevator that Sufficiently Advanced Aliens built for a planetary evacuation of the world's less advanced inhabitants. They jokingly refer to the material used to build it as unobtanium in homage to this trope.
• Skyward: The humans have no ability to make the acclivity stone that allows their ships to levitate, so it is immensely valuable. They have to salvage it from debris that falls from the broken defense fields orbiting the planet. The Krell of course are aware of this, and destroy acclivity rings in debris whenever they see a chance.
• Discussed in this SF short (a Periodic Table Jubilee Special) from Nature Futures, among other thingamajiggiums.
• Chakona Space: One contributing author came up with boronike and its properties. Boronike is often used in heavy duty electronics in general, and the setting's teleporters in large part due to its resistance to being teleported.
• The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere: Iron, which has the ability to bend the fabric of reality and meddle with the laws of physics. Because the foundation of the new plane of existence was built using iron, it can only exist inside said plane in very special circumstances.

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