Deadly High Specific Tensile Strength Materials

Materials with a high specific tensile strength, often in the form of thin wire, can be made so thin and light as to be nearly-invisible. Being so thin, yet stronger than other materials, mean they easily cut through anything.

Examples

• 1970 Ringworld

  The Ringworld's "nights" are shadows cast by a ring of giant squares closer to its sun. These enormous squares are held together by thin wire that the hero ship, The Lying Bastard, crashes into and knocks loose. Later, Ringworld natives use the thin wire to construct traps, beheading an alien.

• 1979 Fountains of Paradise

  An engineer creates such a wire called Hyperfilament which he intends to use to build a space elevator. That engineer later loses a thumb to the fiber during the first deployment attempt of the tether.

• 2008 Three-Body Problem

  A materials laboratory creates a nano-material filament called Flying Blade, which is basically invisible to the human eye. It must be marked with small flags or else potentially cause injury. Authorities use Flying Blade to capture data from an alien-sympathizer faction by stringing it across the Panama Canal as a fence, which cuts their ship into ribbons as it is pulled across "fence" by the canal's tractors.