Some hundred years ago, visionary hydroelectric pioneer Adam Beck proposed a grand scheme for electrically powered trains that would service the transit needs of southern Ontario. Such is the blinding speed at which modern society moves that scarcely a century later, something akin to a much-reduced version of Beck’s proposal became reality in the form of Waterloo Region’s Ion Light Rail System. For the most part the Ion is perfectly functional, some curiously patron-hostile stops aside, but an unexpected emergent property of the system very quickly became apparent: Kitchener-Waterloo drivers are terrible at noticing train-sized objects. You’d think a massive, whale-sized object bearing down on your car would draw attention … but apparently not.
Anyone who has read A. J. Deutsch’s 1950 short, “A Subway Named Möbius” could have predicted that something unexpected would happen.
In this classic story, Boston’s ever-growing MTA adds one station too many. Shortly after the new transit link became functional, train No. 86 vanishes from human ken1. The disappearance is inexplicable, but there is one clue: the MTA system shows No. 86 still on the tracks and still drawing power. An explanation follows, but is not reassuring.
One can hardly say “innovative transit technology” without the words “unexpected emergent property” (and perhaps “then the screaming began”) following soon after. This is doubly true for teleportation-based transit systems. SF authors have been on the job here, considering many, many ways in which teleportation networks could go terribly wrong. Here are five of them:
In Lloyd Biggle Jr.’s 1963 novel All the Colors of Darkness, the Universal Transmitting Company has upended transportation with its innovative teleportation technology. Implementation swiftly follows invention, at which point a disquieting flaw in the system presents itself: not every person who steps into the system emerges from the far end. Private Investigator Jan Darzek sets out to establish whether UTC has foisted a flawed technology on the world, or if they are the victim of sabotage. In very short order, Darzek has a unique perspective on the case, for he too is amongst the missing.
In Alan E. Nourse’s 1965 novelette The Universe Between, the phenomenon that confounds the Centre’s researchers is not obviously a means of transportation. They have created a hypercube—but don’t know what it is or what it can do. Experimentation has left three men dead and two quite insane. Only Gail Talbot has been able to survive the hypercube and harness at least some of its potential. It falls to her son to save the world from the Centre’s next ill-fated foray into bold space-time manipulation, but even he does not fully understand the realm he has been exploring since childhood.
In Thomas Disch’s 1967 novel Echo Round His Bones, Nathan Hansard is transmitted to America’s Camp Jackson Mars via teleporter. This is a routine operation…or so it is believed. Wrongly. Hansard is surprised to discover himself somewhere other than Mars. Teleportation creates phantom duplicates on Earth, living ghosts dependent on the phantom duplicates of supplies sent to Mars. Food is in short supply, but no matter. Some of Hansard’s predecessors have solved the problem in a straightforward manner: by eating their fellow phantoms….
In John Brunner’s novel The Infinitive of Go, practical long-range matter transmission is at hand—or so its inventors believe. It becomes apparent that something crucial has been overlooked when the first long-range dispatch of a courier ends with the courier’s suicide upon arrival. Nothing for it but for one of the technology’s inventors to step through his own invention, at which point he discovers for himself the curious properties of long-range teleportation. He has grossly underestimated the range of his impressive device.
Rather conveniently for the humans of John DeChancie’s Reagan-era Starrigger series, an alien race erected Kerr-Tipler objects that link worlds separated by vast expanses of space-time. That the enigmatic aliens didn’t see fit to leave comprehensive roadmaps hasn’t stopped star-truckers like Jake from using the Kerr-Tipler objects to move goods from world to world. Rumours abound that the full potential of the system has yet to be realized—no one knows the full extent of the Skyway, or how many planets it connects. Inconveniently for Jake McGraw, some very powerful people are convinced that he possesses the full map. Or that he will someday have it… Space-time portals, remember?
As always, feel free to suggest other such works in the comments below…
Originally published in February 2020
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, is one of four candidates for the 2020 Down Under Fan Fund, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Maybe this is why Charlie’s wife didn’t simply hand him that nickel. (No, I won’t explain that reference.)
The movie Event Horizon is all about this trope, since the Gravity Drive warps a ship from one point to another.
At least, its supposed to be two points in our universe…
There was a BBC radio play over ten years back about an instantaneous transport system. The wrinkle was that it didn’t move the passenger, it created a duplicate at the destination and instantaneously killed the original. Problems arise when a passenger is duplicated but her original not killed so now there are two of her. Irritatingly cannot remember title or author.
Stephen King’s short story “The Jaunt” is a wonderful, albeit terrifying, look at teleportation gone wrong. The story focuses on what happens when someone is stuck between the departure and arrival points of a teleportation device, left in limbo for a near eternity. The unfathomable idea of eons left in motionless nothingness is a terror, and the ending of King’s story still haunts me, though it has certainly left me intrigued about other stories of this genre. I’m looking forward to checking out these 6 suggestions.
2: I believe that is James Patrick Kelly’s “Think Like a Dinosaur”, which is included in the eponymous collection.
That one scene from Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a massive departure from the tone one expects in a Trek movie.
Footnote 1: “And he never returned, no he never returned….”
And his fate is still unlearned.
The Punch Escrow by Tal M. Klein. Looks like a novel length version of Think Like a Dinosaur. Tried reading the sample and had to write it off as not my cuppa.
Then there are Will McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol books. The teleporters are basically nanoscale assemblers where you can get dissolved and reconstituted are the destination. Yes, duplicates are a feature, not a bug. Also useful for making things.
Charlie Stross’ Accelerando eventually gets into a wormhole network and that it’s bigger than you think. Also, there’s Glasshouse. You’ve got nanoassembler teleporters (+ duplicates and near immortality) and the wormhole network.
It was a fairly regular theme on early For Who, especially the Troughton era. Transmat systems would go wrong all the time. I suspect the main appeal was that it was much cheaper to stage than a crashed spaceship.
I am reminded of this sad little ditty from the book version of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“I teleported home one day
With Ron, and Sid, and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie’s heart away,
And I got Sidney’s leg.”
“A Subway Named Moebius” was adapted in 1996 as an Argentinian SF movie: “Moebius”. It’s very good and faithful to the original.
My favourite SF story about an unexpected and unintended (human factors-related) effect of teleportation is in this comic…
The teleportation portals in Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star haven’t gone wrong at the time of the book, but they’re going to very soon if the protagonist doesn’t manage to stop the kinkster villain killing the alien that powers them, and when they do anyone who’s ever used one will die.
And, of course, The Prestige, book and movie. Though I suppose really the teleportation in those is working fine, it’s just human psychology going very awry…
@@@@@ 2 Think like a Dinosaur is also an episode of the updated Outer Limits from the 00’s . It starred Enrico Colantoni and after watching how they solved the problem of the original still being on Earth . I didn’t want to read the story. It’s a little to much like the Cold Equations for me.
I couldn’t help but think of Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky when I read this. YA, and fairly basic YA at that, but as with most RAH it has to be judged in the context of a 1955 boy scout serial…
Andrew:
“Longer than you think dad!”
Of course, Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos are a story of teleportation gone morally wrong. The teleportation itself works fine, but there is a cost.
I’d forgotten about Echo Round His Bones. To me, it’s a reminder that great writers aren’t always great.
And I’d almost forgotten about this – Schlock Mercenary. Travel between the stars is accomplished through the use of “wormgates”, large wormhole generators controlled by the enigmatic F’sherl-Ganni Gatekeepers. Who use the gates to create gate clones of people in transit and get information from them (destructive interrogation). Eventually this state of affairs falls when Kevyn Andreyasn invents the teraport and inadvertently touches off the Teraport Wars.
Even as a young child hearing my Dad’s Kingston Trio albums, I could never understand why Charlie’s wife didn’t just put a nickel in the sandwich.
I think it’s pretty clear she didn’t want him back home.
1986’s The Fly immediately springs to mind. “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
In China Mieville’s Kraken, a Star Trek loving mage creates working Federation props including a phaser and a teleporter. Unfortunately, he discovers the teleporter works by disintegrating and then reassembling him at his destination. Also unfortunately, ghosts are real, so his flat is haunted by dozens of dead versions of himself.
I have mentioned Edward D. Hoch before, I think, and his The Transvection Machine is directly on point here. It’s the first in a trio of SF/mystery novels featuring a near-future team of “computer cops”, and involves a “locked teleporter” murder. Hoch was primarily a mystery writer, mostly known for his short stories and the extremely rapid rate at which he produced them (he published at least one story a month in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for some 34 years) – and writing speed notwithstanding, the considerable majority of them were excellent fair-play whodunits. The tech is dated nowadays (these were written in the ’70s), but the social commentary is – in some respects at least – eerily prescient.
Kameron Hurley’s The Light Bridgade uses experimental beaming technology to transport troops quickly around the world or across the solar system. When it doesn’t go wrong in obvious ways – soldiers arriving with mangled body parts – it may be doing stranger things.
There’s the perhaps forgotten Kiln People by David Brin (which I haven’t seen mention of for a while). While not being precisely about travel it’s about the transitory nature of mortality. Suppose your daily body was a clay simulacrum that was designed to last no longer than a day. At the end of the day you can either forget about it and delete the whole thing or upload your memories of that day into the main storage of your your normal body.
The social issues of teleportation were part of the milieu of Alfred Bester’s The Star is My Destination (vt Tiger, Tiger). A teleportation error brings about first contact in Anderson’s The Enemy Stars.
“Litterbug” by Tony Morphett. (And now I am reminded of the vaguely related “Tiger by the Tail” by Alan E. Nourse.)
Larry NIven’s “Flash Crowd”, athough it’s more about the awkward emergent consequences of a teleport system working right.
Larry Niven had more teleportation (“displacement booth”) stories: “The Alibi Machine”, “The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club” (maybe a sequel-ish to “Flash Crowd”?), and “A Kind of Murder”, collected in A Hole in Space.
I’d like to add the very good, “Spock must Die!” from James Blish.
Spock gets split into two people, similar to Captain Kirk. But with Spock, it’ll be a lot more difficult telling which is which.
I dearly loved “The Universe Between,” which I encountered at a very young age, and had a profound impact on my sheltered little brain. Consciousness expanding, to say the least. In fact, Nourse was a marvelous author, and deserves to be more widely remembered.
C. J. Cherryh’s Morgaine novels have “gates” connecting worlds.
John Brunner had another teleportation novel – The World Swappers.
@31. Philippa Chapman
I can’t remember if it was “Spock Must Die”, but a star trek novel I read years ago had a similar plot only it was very easy to tell Spocks apart because (slight SPOILER for 40+ yr old book)
.
.
.
.
one Spock was fully human and one was fully Vulcan.
There was a Voyager novel where they come across a planet with a global transportation system that shifted the whole planet’s population into the next reality over. Unfortunately, in one such reality the planet never formed. Though I suppose all the corpses would eventually coalesce into a planet.
@34/mammam: That was probably Claire Gabriel’s “Ni Var”, a short story in the Star Trek: The New Voyages collection.
@35/noblehunter: And the people on the planet(s) didn’t know it. They were only getting concerned because minor changes (actually differences between universes) kept piling up. The book was called Echoes, by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.
@36 Yes, that’s it! Thank you.
@36.janajansen
Thanks, I was waffling between saying novel and short story
so you’re probably right
Rogue Moon by Algys Budrys, in which volunteers teleport copies of themselves to the Moon to explore a deadly alien maze. The original shares the memories of the copy until the maze does it in. Unfortunately, it’s a one-way trip, and each copy on gaining consciousness is faced with the realization that they are doomed while their original is home living their life.
@0: I haven’t reread the Biggle in some time; I remember it and its sequels as good ~problem-stories (how do you cope with X?).
@33: The Morgaine books don’t merely have teleportation, they fit this column’s theme: the gates turned out to support travel in time as well as space, allowing meddlers from the species that invented the gates to rip up their own past. Morgaine is on a mission to destroy them. Not a spoiler as this is made clear early on — the stories are the difficulties of getting from one gate to the next through the remains of societies.
I’m noting that all of the host’s examples, and most of the ones added in comments, are decades old (or at least remakes of decades-old stories); the Hurley is the one recent example that I see. Has teleportation been used up as a trope?
Wikipedia:
“To Be is a Canadian animated short film released in 1990 and directed by John Weldon, who also composed its music.[1] “To Be” was nominated for a Palme d’Or for best short film in 1990.[2] From 1997 to 2002, the film was shown on Cartoon Network as part of the O Canada anthology series of National Film Board of Canada films. The film concerns an ontological problem known as the teletransportation paradox.”
“This article consists almost entirely of a plot summary. “
I liked the music, and I liked the female lead character. It’s creepy if the machine is killing the original person each time (spoiler? ROT13 code? vg rkcyvpvgyl anl tencuvpnyyl vf qbvat gung) but it’s also funny. And… a happy ending?
But I don’t think the problem was new when I saw that. Well – I had seen that Star Trek episode and/or read James Blish’s treatment of it, and I’d read “Spock Must Die!” Wikipedia’s article on the paradox refers to Stanislaw Lem (1957) and to the “Radio Times” TV/radio guide magazine web site, which has an article about a certain Doctor Who episode.
“Spock Must Die!” has McCoy at the start arguing that if the transporter moves your body but not your soul, then it murders a person and creates a zombie each time it is used… well, the first time. After that, it’s just zombie to zombie.
I think some god-guy in Roger Zelazny’s “Creatures of Light and Darkness” was basically bullying a prisoner by doing things like replacing their meat body with robot parts, and may have eventually made their victim cease to exist, then recreated them. It’s not teleportation but it poses the same problem.
I think the 1940s (!) “Venus Equilateral” setting ended up with matter transmission, which could also create duplicate people but this was… very unpopular, to the extent that if you simply had an identical twin brother, it was frowned on. So one story deals with a character with the problem of dealing with his evil twin brother. Ah… “Identity” (1945). Apparently, surgeons do tricky surgery on a teleport duplicate of the patient, but only for practice: the duplicate presumably is euthanised? But, doesn’t that double the cost of treatment?
“Earth: Final Conflict” series had the supposedly benevolent aliens gifting a teleport system for Earthlings that occasionally lost people for… I don’t remember exactly, I’ll say research. Spoiler, again? It turns out that missing people were actually transferred to the alien moon base. Until that reveal, I think no one knew about the alien moon base (except the aliens obvs).
RAH: The Roads Must Roll.
In Clifford Simak’s The Goblin Reservation, Professor Peter Maxwell teleports home to Earth. He discovers that he’s already arrived home. And been murdered. Then things get complicated.
A subplot in There Is a Crooked Man by Jack Wodhams is that lovestruck teens deliberately misuse teleportation devices to get closer together (much closer).
Ben Aaronovitch’s Doctor Who novel Transit picks up the iffy teleport network from the Sixties episode The Seeds of Death and adds some extra cyberpunk-flavoured failure modes and nasty ways of dying.
@43: Huh? The rolling roads of the title are conveyor belts.
Well, in a sense trains are portal networks, given that you can only board or disembark at specific places. Waterloo Region’s LRT, for example, has positioned its university adjacent stops such that Wilfrid Laurier University students headed to Waterloo Public Library might as well walk, since the distance to WPL is about the same as the distance to the nearest LRT stop and the distance to the library from the stop nearest it.
In fact, the supposed WLU stop is closer to the University of Waterloo than it is WLU….
@49: Roddenberry’s “Genesis Two” was designed to use intercontinental subways as a portal network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_II_(film)
There’s Kris Neville’s novelette “Thyre Planet” (Galaxy, October 1968), in which the alien-created teleportation system has a bug — every so often, the people being teleported never show up at their destination. The story is about the colonizing humans deciding to find and fix the bug (despite that (sadly unfunny) efforts of Dilbertian boss to hamstring the effort so he can keep his job longer), after which every human (and alien!) who was previously lost simultaneously arrives at their destination.
@a-j RE the BBC radio play
Think like a Dinosaur – Outer Limits
Work this URL and you’ll find tons of old books
Theres an interesting African perspective on this in Wole Talabi’s “Incompleteness Theories” which discusses unintended consequences of disassembling and reassembling people. Memorable.