Now we come to a humorous bit. A kind of vehicle comprises a detached Ferris wheel with the driver and passengers seated in a gimbal-mounted box at the hub while six "yachis," kangaroo-like animals, are tethered on platforms just within the rim. The driver induces each yachi in turn to leap, thus propelling the vehicle forward.
This "yachina" is to be surpassed only by a kind of spaceship imagined by Bob Shaw. Shaped like a railway carriage and with a teleportation device at each end, the ship crosses space by repeatedly teleporting itself to itself, thus tumbling between stars faster than light. (Apart from the tumbling, this sounds like the multiple quantum jumps of the hyperdrive in Poul Anderson's Technic History.)
Shaw contributes one other FTL drive. In The Palace Of Eternity, when a Bussard ramjet passes a certain percentage of light speed, Einsteinian physics are superseded by the magical-sounding Arthurian physics, named after the physicist Arthur Arthur, and acceleration can continue beyond c. (Unfortunately, the crew of Anderson's Leonora Christine did not know this.)
Anderson was interested in humor, alternative FTL drives and Bussard ramjets so I imagine that he appreciated Shaw's contributions.
Does anyone out there know of any other "Transports of Delight"?
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
It would be interesting if an Anderson/Dickson fan with some money to spar tried building a real yachina using our Earth's kangaroos! And would such a device WORK?
I'm ALMOST sure I came across the phrase "transports of delight" somewhere in one of Anderson's stories. But I'm not sure where.
Sean
Paul:
If when you asked about "transports of delight," you meant uncommon concepts for achieving FTL, then I'd offer the drive in Colin Kapp's Patterns of Chaos. It works by principles resembling sympathetic magic: the ship has a 3-D star map, and sets up its jump by creating a pattern of ultra-fine copper wires, "defining positions and axes and measuring critical paths," between the simulated stars in the map. When the drive activates, the ship no longer exists in the space-time continuum, but is actually in the "ersatz galaxy in the subspace cavity deep within its own guts" — it's inside itself.
"Stories still survived of spacemen who claimed to have seen the copper bars straddling the stars at the end of a subspace jump. Bron was not certain about this, but he did know that technicians caught in the subspace cavity during the jump had observed the ionization trail of their own ship speeding from web to web. Those of them, that is, who managed to recover from the shock."
David,
FTL and any other comical vehicles.
Poul Anderson tried to invent a new rationale for FTL for each new fictional future but he knew enough physics to enable him to do this.
Paul.
Paul:
Well, this isn't quite the same thing, but it can be said to be "delightful transport."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7gR7EYjcP8
"Have you ever noticed how in Hollywood movies, all the villains are played by Brits?"
"And we all drive Jaguars."
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