Teleportation/Transportation/Transference

While we are paralleling future histories, we should include Star Trek. Merseians, kzinti and Klingons are obvious parallels. However, Star Trek has transporters and Known Space has transfer booths whereas the Technic History does not have teleportation.

An alien interstellar empire does have teleportation in Poul Anderson's "Interloper." However, the human societies in his Technic History do not develop such a mode of travel. But this makes the Technic History more plausible. How could a physical object or a human being be transported from one place to another without traversing the intervening space? Is it destroyed at the first place and reconstructed at the second? In that case, it is not transported - and could surely be duplicated at several places?

A civilization with sufficient knowledge and energy to practice teleportation would surely be capable of feats for beyond those that are otherwise displayed in either Star Trek or the Known Space History? In Clifford Simak's City, men in a dome on Jupiter can transform one of their number into an organism that can survive on the Jovian surface, then return him to human form. With that much knowledge and power, why do they huddle (Simak's own word) in a dome?

I think that Anderson's limited use of teleportation as an sf prop is a sign of his carefulness as an sf writer.

Teleportation And Instantaneity

Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars recalls not only James Blish's Cities In Flight but also two of his Haertel Scholium works, "Nor Iron Bars" and "Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time. The common concepts are teleportation and instantaneity.

In The Enemy Stars, teleportation is instantaneous because the carrier wave is gravitational, not electromagnetic. In "Nor Iron Bars," when a spaceship assumes negative mass in order to make an FTL interstellar crossing, the ship collapses into the microcosm which is the only realm where mass can be negative and where it also turns out that parapsychological phenomena like telepathy and teleportation occur. Negative mass gives the ship some of the properties of a Dirac hole, meaning that it has to be echoed somewhere else in the universe by an electron and can be in two places simultaneously. Reverting to positive mass, it returns to the macrocosm but in the other location and thus has made an interstellar crossing of eight hundred light-years. However, the process weakens molecular bonds, making the ship's hull permeable to oxygen so that it cannot be reused.

In "Beep"/Quincunx, as in Cities In Flight, the above mentioned property of a Dirac hole is used to develop an instantaneous interstellar communicator. See The Dirac Transmitter.

Pseudo-Teleportation?

See Teleportation, "Beam Me Up" and here.

In Jerry Pournelle's and SM Stirling's "The Children's Hour," transfer booths are described as "...instantaneous transportation..." (Man-Kzin Wars II, p. 215) whereas, in the same authors' "The Asteroid Queen," the booths are referred to as "...lightspeed pseudo-teleporation." (Man-Kzin Wars III, p. 80)

Travel via the booths is subjectively instantaneous but objectively lightspeed but how is the teleportation "pseudo-"? I think that any kind of teleportation represents a much higher level of technology than is evidenced elsewhere in this period of the Known Space future history. Does Poul Anderson rationalize it in any way in his contributions to the series?

At present, I am regarding two Man-Kzin Wars trilogies, the first by Pournelle and Stirling and the second by Anderson, as a single sub-series to be analyzed as a unit. Anything said in one of these six works might reverberate in any of the others. The transfer booths are an obvious point to ask questions about. If Anderson had introduced the idea, then he would have devised an appropriate rationalization but how does he respond to transfer booths when they are already present in a shared scenario?

Time And Motion

Poul Anderson's fiction involves:

space travel;
time travel;
teleportation;
inter-universal travel -

- so let's analyze "travel."

Matter is a form of energy and has four forms - solid, liquid, gas, plasma.

All energy exists in space but let's consider solids.

Solids are extended and impenetrable.

Space is the intervals and relationships between solids.

Empirically, space is three dimensional although we hypothesize extra dimensions for various theoretical purposes.

 
The position of a solid, or a "material object," is its spatial relationships to other such objects.

Motion is change of position.

Time is the relationship between positions changed from and positions changed to.

Therefore (I think), time is not merely a fourth spatial dimension although there are clear analogies between the three spatial dimensions and the single temporal dimension.

Four coordinates are necessary to define an event.

Thus, at any given time, a particular point in three dimensional space either is or is not occupied by a material object.

To move directly from point A to point B is successively to occupy every point on the shortest distance between A and B.

On the surface of a sphere, the shortest distance is a curve, not a straight line.

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, a faster than light spaceship moving from A to B does not successively occupy every intervening point.

Instead, it makes many instantaneous quantum jumps between separated points and thus evades the light speed limit which applies only to objects that do traverse every intervening point.

If the ship were able to quantum jump directly from A to B, then we might call its mode of travel "teleportation."

In a comedy sf novel, Bob Shaw imagined a long, thin spaceship with a teleportation transmitter at the back and a teleportation receiver at the front.

The ship repeatedly teleports itself to itself, thus traversing interstellar space by curiously alternating between back to front and front to back positions.

This is taking longer than I expected. I will have to continue later.

Down The Wires

Perish By The Sword, 7.

Unbe-
freaking-
lievable!

In the previous post, we quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the present post, we invoke superheroes.

"Suddenly all of him wanted to be dissolved, flesh turned into energy, to pulse down the wires at light speed and be where she was." (p. 66)

This is a science fiction idea: teleportation. Furthermore, a DC Comics superhero, the Silver Age Atom, was able not only to shrink to any size but also to travel by telephone. The attached image shows him doing this with none other than Superman.

Through a telephone receiver, we hear not the speaker's voice but a recognizable reproduction of it. Similarly, I expect a teleporter, or in this case a telephone, to emit not the original guy but his duplicate.

But there you are. Poul Anderson does not suggest that anyone would be able to travel through a telephone although he does present teleportation in one or two stories.

Quiz question: In how many works does Anderson present teleportation? (They should all be mentioned in the blog search result for "teleportation," linked from the previous paragraph.)

Five (And More) Future Histories

We have often listed "future histories," including Poul Anderson's several such series or single works. Let us now focus on just five interconnected future histories:

Poul Anderson's Technic History and Larry Niven's Known Space series are arguably the most significant successors to Robert Heinlein's original Future History;

Anderson's Psychotechnic History, modelled directly on the Future History, occupies a position intermediate between the Future and Technic Histories;

despite the prominence of his Known Space series, Niven presents an entirely different history of the future in his "State" series -

A World Out Of Time

The Integral Trees

The Smoke Ring

In Volume I, two individuals from different periods make relativistic round trips to the galactic core whereas, in Volumes II and III, an interstellar crew has mutinied and colonized the Smoke Ring.

I am currently rereading The Integral Trees when not rereading Anderson's Brain Wave.

A list of Niven's series at the end of his Tales Of Known Space places "Rammer," the first part of A World Out Of Time, in the short Leshy Circuit sequence which is also about Bussard ramjets. Teleportation booths are common to Known Space, the State and a separate "Teleportation" series. Niven begins to rival Anderson in the number of his alternative future history series.

Time And Motion II

We are still discussing "travel." However, we have already discussed time travel here and here. We will say a little more about space travel and teleportation before turning to inter-universal travel.

Although the quantum jump FTL space travel in Poul Anderson's Technic History is called "hyperspace," this phrase usually means disappearing from ordinary space into some other kind of space, as in Anderson's Planet Of No Return.

Although the term "teleportation" is not used, spaceships in World Without Stars can make an instantaneous jump even to another galaxy but must first match the relative velocity of the target galaxy. In The Enemy Stars, fuel and crews are teleported to slower than light interstellar spaceships and people teleport between Earth and the extrasolar colonies.

In Operation Chaos (New York, 1995):

"'The salamander uses a simple diffraction process to change the spatial coordinates of psi squared, in effect going from point to point without crossing the intervening distance, much like an electron making a quantum jump...'" (p. 83)

A succubus attacked by a werewolf:

"'...struggled to change the mathematical form of its Schrodinger function, thus fleeing to the Low Continuum where it belonged and leaving [the werewolf] with the exchange mass." (p. 118)

We now encounter a rule to the effect that, when traveling from universe A to universe B, a body must change places with a corresponding mass in universe B, thus displacing that mass to universe A, and must reverse the exchange for the return journey, even though such a rule is not mentioned in other texts about inter-universal travel.

A Few Short, Focused Future Histories

Long future histories - Heinlein's, Anderson's or Niven's - are just about the future whereas a few short future historical series focus on a single concept.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles: Mars;
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot: robots;
James Blish, The Seedling Stars: "pantropy";
Poul Anderson, Tales Of The Flying Mountains: "gyrogravitics";
Poul Anderson, Maurai: post-nuclear recovery;
Poul Anderson, Kith: STL interstellar travel;
ERB, The Moon Maid: Lunar invasion;
Larry Niven, Teleportation: teleportation.

Eight loose examples, three by Anderson. Whatever is said about sf is usually said about Anderson.

Studying a future history, an sf fan's mind moves either forward along a single timeline, e.g., with van Rijn on Diomedes, or sideways between timelines as above. Although we imagine multiple timelines, each future history usually remains autonomous except once when van Rijn visits the Old Phoenix.

This Bank Holiday weekend:

May Day March;
a moot;
the big annual charity car boot sale at Ryelands Park.

For the retired, life is a long weekend.

What Is Possible?

It is theoretically possible that there are divergent timelines and parallel universes but not that there are inter-universal "Gates" located at exactly the same longitudes and latitudes on the surfaces of parallel Earths. Sf authors, usually preferring to make life easy for their characters, imagine not only "Gates" but also other unlikely means of transportation: teleportation, time travel and FTL. (Which Poul Anderson short story has teleportation? - search the blog.)

A story can be set on an alternative Earth without any "Gates" or other means of inter-universal travel. Anderson does this - and also, in other works, does imagine inter-universal travel. An interstellar story can be based on either FTL or STL travel. Anderson, of course, does both. What else could a writer of fiction do? Well, they do all sorts of things but a comprehensive writer like Anderson had to address every possibility.

Means And Motives For Interstellar Contact

Means
radio
suspended animation
acceleration to and deceleration from relativistic speeds
star drives reaching near light speed without acceleration
faster than light, including quantum hyperdrive
instantaneous jumps, requiring time-consuming journeys between jumps
teleportation devices transported in slower than light ships
psychic teleportation between planetary surfaces
a T-machine

Motives
propaganda
racial survival
sharing the benefits of civilization
war and imperialism
trade in luxury items
trade in ideas and sciences
exploration
a new start on a new planet
interstellar travel as a way of life

"Terran" And "Interstellar"

Poul Anderson's Technic History has a Terran Empire. Robert Heinlein's Citizen Of The Galaxy has a Terran Hegemony. Sf writers have coined "Terran" as an alternative to "Terrestrial."

Sf  is "interstellar" if someone in it has traversed interstellar space. Thus:

(i) extra-solar aliens have arrived here;

(ii) an exploratory expedition has departed from the Solar System;

(iii) travel between inhabited planetary systems has become routine, like trans-Atlantic air travel now. 

Robert Heinlein's seven juvenile interstellar novels divide into one of (i), one of (ii) and five of (iii).

Poul Anderson has (i) in some short stories, (ii) in Tau Zero and (iii) in many works that are familiar to us.

In Anderson's The Enemy Stars, a slower than light interstellar spaceship carries an instantaneous teleportation transceiver so that the ship can be refueled at any time and also crews can pass between Earth and the ship. In Heinlein's Tunnel In The Sky, receiverless instantaneous interstellar teleportation is possible between planetary surfaces: no spaceships needed. Impossible!

"Ages Before You Were Born"

"Time Patrol," 6.

In a time travel scenario, unless we are very careful, we wind up thinking of different times as if they were different places coexisting at the same time.

Two SF Scenarios
(i) Instantaneous interplanetary teleportation: someone teleports from Earth to Mars, spends twenty minutes on Mars, then returns to Earth - arriving twenty minutes after his departure? Yes.

(ii) Time travel, meaning the ability to disappear at any time and to (re)appear at any other time, whether earlier or later: someone disappears from 2020, appears in 3020, spends twenty minutes in that year, disappears from then and reappears back in 2020 - appearing twenty minutes after his disappearance from that year? Not necessarily. With the ability of time travel as described, he can appear at any time in 2020, not just twenty minutes after his original disappearance from that year.

A Danellian tells Everard:

"Your appeal has been considered... It was known and weighed ages before you were born." (p. 51)

The Danellians, who live over a million years after Everard, considered his appeal ages before he was born?  No. That does not sound right. Are we thinking of the twentieth century and the Danellian Era as if they were two different places that have coexisted for ages?

There is a simple solution. Given the mutable nature of history in the Time Patrol series, the Danellians must surely establish a base many ages in the past. Thus, that base would be unaffected by any alterations to human history made by time criminals. In that base, Danellians would be able to spend as much time as they needed to consider Everard's appeal and to perform any other such tasks.

But, nevertheless, when we first read the Danellian's statement did we then unreflectingly think that someone who lives over a million years after Everard's lifetime could have considered Everard's appeal ages before his birth?

Planetary Designations III

Poul Anderson, "Horse Trader," see here.

Alpha Centauri B II is an inner planet so maybe it is terrestroid? In fact, its envoy, Helmung, is a large blue humanoid with beady eyes, a black mane, a battered face, antennae and tattoos. (All these guys have two eyes in front. This is an anthropomorphic assumption.)

Helmung, who is from the continent of Almerik, carries a spear and a sword and wants fights, females and booze so it sounds as if Almerik is based on Almuric which is like Barsoom: Cairn travels there by teleportation and finds beautiful women.

Helmung wants spaceships and atomic weapons to "'...sack many worlds...'" (p. 289) - like the barbarians in the Technic History. His people have limited telekinetic power, enough to affect dice, possibly based on neural-quantum interaction. So even these dudes might have something to offer - also something to explain the mysterious data theft that is being investigated. Sf and detective fiction meet again.

Hyperdrive Fields

Does Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History present any rationale for the sf cliche of "hyperspace"? His later Technic History presents a beautiful rationale: a ship in hyperspace is not in another space or another dimension but is making many instantaneous quantum jumps through normal space. Thus, it has a "pseudo-velocity" in a very real sense:

it disappears at point A and appears at point B without having traversed the space between them;
however, points A and B are very close so that many such jumps must be made.

Hyperspace in the Psychotechnic History has the following features, some of them familiar from other works -

(i) A spaceship generates "hyperdrive fields."
(ii) While building up, the fields cause a twisting sensation in human bodies.
(iii) The ship then moves at a pseudo-velocity.
(iv) It is safer to go hyper in a weak gravitational field.
(v) Too close to a star and planet, the drive builds up "...with distressing irregularity." (The Peregrine, Chapter XIV, p. 126)
(vi) Any hyperdrive ship is elongated because "...field generators must be mounted fore and aft." (p. 123)

I am reminded of a humorous sf novel by Bob Shaw. An interstellar spaceship, shaped like a long trailer or a railway carriage, has a teleportation transmitter at one end and a receiver at the other. Thus it is seen continually turning around in space as it repeatedly transmits itself to itself.

You Too Can Blog About Poul Anderson

Reread Poul Anderson's novels, series and collections.
Write summaries of descriptive passages.
Notice how the author appeals to at least three senses when describing either natural scenes or human activities.
Look out for regular literary devices, e.g., a character's moment of realization. (There is a human or technical problem. The viewpoint character will solve the problem but does not tell us how until he does it.)
Identify works that address major science fictional concepts: telepathy, teleportation, robots, aliens, artificial intelligence, immortality, interstellar travel either slower or faster than light, matter transmutation, time travel, a science of society, social organization in the future.
Notice how the author systematically addresses many such concepts from every possible angle.
Appreciate the broad range of genres handled by Anderson.
Engage critically with the author's philosophy and his views on society and history.

Later: google for book covers and see comment.

Comprehensiveness And Beyond

In his comprehensiveness as an sf writer, Poul Anderson addressed:

telepathy

teleportation

mutants

longevity

immortality

scientifically rationalized magic

interplanetary exploration

slower-than-light interstellar travel

a generation ship

several scientific rationalizations of faster-than-light travel

several versions of Martians

other aliens

extraterrestrial environments, ecologies and evolutions

cosmological sf

eight future histories, including Heinleinian and Stapledonian models

time travel, with both paradoxes

alternative histories

the Frankenstein question ("Is it right to create human beings?")

robots

conscious artificial intelligence

a predictive science of society

future warfare

dystopian futures

post-nuclear-war Earth

space opera

excellent contributions to several other authors' series

- but not artifacts larger than planets, as in:

the Ringworld Tetralogy and "Bigger Than Worlds" by Larry Niven

the Orbitsville Trilogy

the Bowl Of Heaven Trilogy by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

The Lords Of Creation by SM Stirling

And now we know the answer to an earlier question:

CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy is set on Mars, Venus and Earth;

SM Stirling's Lords Of Creation Trilogy is set on Venus and Mars and in a Dyson Sphere. 

Transports Of Delight

Star Prince Charlie, 2.

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"?

Three By Four

My proposed seventeen volume edition of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization would include three four-story collections:

Vol VI, Avalon And Empire
"Wingless"
"Rescue on Avalon"
"The Star Plunderer"
"Sargasso of Lost Starships"

Vol XII, Captain Flandry I
"Tiger by the Tail"
"Honorable Enemies"
"The Game of Glory"
"Hunters of the Sky Cave"

Vol XVII, After The Empire (or The Post-Imperial Age)
"A Tragedy of Errors"
"The Night Face"
"The Sharing of Flesh"
"Starfog"

These volumes are, respectively, pre-Flandry, Flandry and post-Flandry. Despite their obvious similarities, there are considerable differences between them.

Vol VI comprises a planet Avalon diptych and an early Terran Empire diptych. (To be more precise, the founding of the Empire is proclaimed at the end of "The Star Plunderer.") The two diptychs differ in length, content, target audience and dates of publication. The Empire stories are pulp sf, 1952, whereas the Avalon stories are juvenile sf, 1973. However, the four stories read in sequence present a perfect prelude to Vol VII, The People Of The Wind (1973), in which the Empire attacks Avalon.

The four stories in Vol XII have a continuing central character and present just one period of his career. Further, the second, third and fourth stories each explicitly refer back to the previous installment. Thus, this volume is a unified tetralogy. The following volume, Vol XIII, Captain Flandry II, would comprise the diptych, "A Message in Secret" and "A Plague of Masters," in which, again, the second installment is a direct sequel to the first.

The stories in Vol XVII, set in different centuries, are united mainly by the fact that the centuries in which they are set are all long after the Fall of the Empire, but there is also a similarity of content. In each, a human-crewed spaceship interacts with a planetary population that has long been isolated from the human mainstream - a Star Trek scenario, except that these populations are descendants of human colonists, not humanoid aliens.

In "The Sharing of Flesh," the Allied planets spaceship New Dawn, not the USS Enterprise, is in orbit around Lokon (see here). New Dawn crew members have descended in a boat, not by teleportation. The problem to be solved is why the Lokonese universally practice cannibalism. The computer, summarizing relevant data, mentions ceremonial cannibalism but does not refer to communion in which participants are believed to receive divine grace by consuming the body of their deity.

Jerusalem Catholicism still existed before the Empire fell but we are not told about any religions post-Empire.

Travel In Different Directions

Several kinds of travel as yet exist only in science fiction:

aircars;
faster than light (FTL) interstellar travel;
instantaneous transportation;
teleportation (which might be at light speed);
time travel;
travel in other directions - between timelines, universes etc.

As usual, I wound up with a longer list than expected when I started to write it.

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, in 19352 AD:

"'...the various governments were pawns in a galactic game. The time effect was the by-product of a search for a means of instantaneous transportation, which some of you will realize requires infinitely discontinuous functions for its mathematical description - as does travel into the past.'" (Time Patrol, p. 9)

Especially in an Andersonian hard sf context, the phrase "...galactic game..." strongly implies FTL, although this is not made explicit. Thus, people with FTL (we think), seek instantaneous travel and find time travel, in fact space-time travel which therefore includes instantaneous travel - if the traveler changes his spatial but not his temporal coordinates.

We have already asked why Everard and Whitcomb were trained to handle spaceships if, at that stage, they were expected to work only in their own 1850-2000 milieu. But other questions arise about space travel:

Surely there will be many different kinds of spaceships in future eras?
Both for training and for operations, the Patrol has large spacecraft in past eras so they must be able to move such large objects through time?

For story purposes, we see only timecycles and other small vehicles moving along Earth's world line. In the future, they must have spacecraft that can transport prisoners instantaneously to the (extrasolar?) exile planet and that can also travel to the Oligocene to be used for the training of Time Patrol cadets. The possibilities seem endless.

Future History Treks

Ensign Flandry, CHAPTER NINE.

"The Dronning Margrete was not of a size to land safely on a planet. Her auxiliaries were small spaceships in their own right." (p. 81)

This is familiar territory to Trekkies although the Dronning Margrete is not as big as the Enterprise and does not have "transporters." But Poul Anderson does have teleportation in other works. 

Okie cities are even bigger but do land on planets. However, they control gravity and were built on planets in the first place. They are around us now. In Anderson's Psychotechnic History, Nomad ships are big enough to carry entire clans, who live in them, but they also land on planets.

It feels as if these future histories:

the Technic History

the Okie History

Star Trek

the Psychotechnic History

- and some others are very close to each other if not also to our timeline. Surely Trekkies should check out Anderson and Blish?