The gulfs of space are vast, awesome, and highly inconvenient. Crossing them with conventional chemical rockets would take millennia. Indeed, any rocket using even halfway plausible technology seems likely to consume several human lifespans before reaching even the closest stars.1
Many authors, not wanting their characters to die of old age getting to Proxima Centauri, have abandoned plausible transport methods for the starkly implausible. Best of all? Techniques that allow travellers to step directly from one world to another without the bother of dealing with the intervening distance. The novels and series below feature five such methods.
The Universe Between by Alan E. Nourse (1965)
Little is known of the odd hypercube-type thing that has appeared as a result of advanced cryogenics research except that trying to determine its nature killed three brilliant men and sent two more to the asylum. The best men having failed, Dr. McEvoy turns to the best girl, Gail Talbot. The teen’s miserable childhood made her far more cognitively adaptable than her adult predecessors. Illuminated by her encounter with the hyperdimensional Threshold, Gail exits McEvoy’s employ to pursue her own agenda.
A generation later, Gail’s son Robert uses skills that he learned from Gail in the service of humanity. Not least, the opening of alien worlds to resource-short humanity through the shortcut offered by the Threshold. However, it becomes painfully clear that Gail, Robert, and their enigmatic allies on the other side of the Threshold are ignorant of important facts, and that there are potentially unsurmountable consequences from travelling via Threshold.
This would have been an even better page-turner if Gail had remained the protagonist. Not sure why Nourse felt the need to shift focus from her to her son, unless it was that he or his editor didn’t think SF audiences would accept female protagonists.
Star Rider by Doris Piserchia (1974)
The Jakalowar (Jak for short) hedonists eschew mechanical means of transport. This is because they do not need them. Any Jak nomad can wrap themselves in a bubble of breathable air. Any Jak can jink from one world to another. The Milky Way is the Jak playground—but only the Milky Way. As impressive as Jak jinking is, no Jak has the range to reach other galaxies. Thus, for two million years, the nomads have been confined to the Milky Way.
Jade2 sets out to find mythical planet Doubleluck. Many Jaks have searched for the mythical paradise. Jade manages to find the veiled planet. Consequences follow, many alarming. It’s the price of ending two million years of social stasis.
While limits can be vexing, the Milky Way is very large. I suppose it’s a credit to the otherwise work-shy Jaks that being confined to a mere four hundred billion stars annoys them.
The Journeys of McGill Feighan: Caverns (1981), Reefs (1981), Lava (1982), and Cliffs (1986) by Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.
McGill Feighan’s childhood was marked by an odd experience: when yet an infant, he had been consumed, then regurgitated still alive, by an enigmatic alien representative of Far Being Retzglaran. When the boy grew older, he was revealed as a Flinger, one of those rare individuals able to teleport himself and others across interstellar distances. Others may wonder what they’re going to do when they grow up, but not McGill. As soon as his powers manifested, McGill was destined to spend his life as a living and vital part of the interstellar trade infrastructure.
Of course, Flingers are as dangerous as they are useful.3 The government goes to alarming extremes to ensure that Flingers are dutiful, loyal, and law-abiding. Flingers are valuable to other folks; the galaxy-spanning criminal Organization. The Organization would love to somehow suborn McGill, particularly if in the process they gained insight into the Far Being Retzglaran’s motives.
Hence the cost of McGill’s powers is a life of isolation, while knowing that he is coveted by government and criminals alike.
McGill got et and spat up on the orders of the Far Being Retzglaran. I’d love to say that readers of this series eventually find out why Retzglaran ordered this…but, alas, the series stopped before that question was ever answered.
I also note that that author O’Donnell was prone to extreme mood shifts in his fiction; he could flip from light-hearted humor to the revelation that someone’s parents had been kidnapped and murdered. Reader beware.
Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2019)
Planet Nine proves no planet at all; it’s a vast, enigmatic alien artifact. Protagonist Gary Rendell was a member of the joint mission exploring the massive structure, none of whose members appear to have ever read stories about what happens to people who explore enigmatic alien artifacts.4
The good news? The space-time structures within Planet Nine span interstellar distances. A person can walk from Sol to Aldebaran in a cosmic blink of an eye. The catch? A cosmic blink of an eye is very long from a human perspective. Not only that, but a person who set off on such a journey, willingly or otherwise, may find the results disturbing. To paraphrase Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
(This is one of those works that James read all the way to the end before realizing on which classic work the author was riffing. I could do a list of such works; the trick would be getting it down to five.)
Protagonists of stories like this almost never read stories like this. If they did, they’d make very different, story-hostile decisions like refusing to go on the mission, and then there’d be no story. Wandering through alien space-time tunnels may seem like a terrible idea, but it’s actually much worse than that.
The Blackwing War by K. B. Spangler (2021)
Tembi Stoneskin is one of the Deep’s pet humans. As long as the vast, enigmatic entity cares for Tembi, Tembi is an ageless witch with access to galactic range teleportation. This is an uncommon but not unheard-of arrangement.
Unlike most witches, Tembi comes from poverty. Unlike most witches, Tembi is a political idealist who works to reform the current system. Reformers are unpopular at the best of times. This is not the best of times. The highly racist Blackwing movement is determined to make unmodified humanity great again, either by subjugating genetically engineered colonists or by exterminating them entirely. The out anti-racist Tembi is a prime Blackwing target. Even someone like Tembi, who has suffered terrible abuse from her own society, will be surprised how far Blackwing is willing to go.
The Deep is functionally a godlike puppy, very fond of some humans, able to perform what amount to miracles, without much awareness about consequences and implications. You’d think this would make humans much more cautious about how they deal with the Deep than they actually are.
***
Teleportation, whether psionic or technological, is so convenient that dozens of authors have resorted to it for their stories (indeed, my very first Tor.com post involved a novel about galactic range teleportation). You may well have favourites not mentioned above. If so, comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]Note regarding stellar distances: stars move. Wait a million years or so and Gliese 710 will be a mere ten thousand astronomical units away. Unless, of course, there’s a small error in our calculations and it careens through the inner Solar System, dooming us all.
[2]Any Tor.com essay on dogs could well mention Jade’s space travelling doggo mount, Hinx, who is a very good dog indeed.
[3]One way that Flingers are dangerous is that they can spread pandemics. Another way: they must compensate for the large difference in velocity between origin and destination. This power can be misused. A Flinger can in theory teleport a ton of air zero distance while changing its velocity by, oh, a hundred kilometers per second. Instant fireball.
[4]Exploring enigmatic alien artifacts: Budrys’ “Rogue Moon” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Moon). Worth reading if you haven’t read this yet.
I will let someone else mention the obvious and truly great classic.
I really enjoyed Dark Orbit, by Carolyn Ives Gilman, published in 2015. It is set in a future where humanity has settled on 20 worlds. Interstellar travel is limited by the speed of light. Then a very strange planet is discovered. It is habitable, but there are powerful forces that disrupt the expedition in unexpected ways. I don’t want to spoil it, but I can say that the speculative physics explored the limits of plausibility without exceeding them, at least for me. It definitely belongs on this list. With great characters and compelling plot lines, it’s an excellent and unique novel that can only be science fiction.
I thought of Dark Orbit but I’d mentioned it in another essay.
Another example: Cherryh’s Morgaine series, whose plot is driven by the need to find and shut down space-time gates left by a vanished civilization whose technical competence far exceeded their prudence.
“Gully Foyle is my name…”
Teleportation systems abound in SF, some of them with noticeable downsides….
Like the “farcaster” network in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion and sequels. Instant travel across any distance, just as easy as walking through a door. One of the characters even has a “farcaster house” at one point – a home where every room is on a different planet. Unfortunately, the repeated tearing of holes in the space-time continuum causes massive environmental damage on a higher metaphysical plane, so God intervenes personally to shut the network down.
This sort of ultra-convenient system is also at work in Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star. Galactic civilization is based on the teleporter network made available by a somewhat peculiar species of aliens. The catch is that the system depends on these aliens personally supporting it… and, if they ever stop, not only will the system stop working, everyone who’s ever used it will die… and, as the book progresses, we discover that there is precisely one alien left propping it all up, and this particular alien is being slowly tortured to death.
I would let Saul Dunn’s dire The Coming of Steeleye languish in well-deserved obscurity, but I feel I have to mention its “Telpor” system, a commercially available – and, in fact, popular and widely used – instant-travel network. It’s one of those disintegration/reintegration setups, and there is a 100% chance that it will disintegrate you at your point of departure – and an 88% chance that it will reintegrate you at your point of arrival. People commute using this thing, although presumably not for long.
On balance, I think I’ll take the bus.
John de Chancie’s Skyway trilogy addresses hyperspace portals at ground level forming an interplanetary freeway travelled by many races. Take a wrong turn and end up who knows where? Vehicles travelling the Skyway need to essentially be spaceships with wheels Cue up your Deep Purple.
Howard Taylor’s webcomic Schlock Mercenary features 2 differing kinds of teleportation. First is the F’sherl-Ganni Wormgate system which is a disintegration/reintegration system. It also allows for a little light espionage on the behalf of the F’sherl-Ganni who clone, interrogate and subsequently kill everyone who ever passes through a gate. One tiny little mistake in the output can result in your instantly becoming an entire demographic.
One of the protagonists (re)develops the Teraport, which is a wormhole-based system that has its own drawbacks.
5: Shades of Clarke’s Travel by Wire:
Chaosium’s FutureWorld avoided the Teraport issues by making gate generators expensive high tech gear (so not everyone has them) and by giving gate generators the ability to jam incoming gates (so everyone needs them for defence).
@5: “Unfortunately, the repeated tearing of holes in the space-time continuum causes massive environmental damage on a higher metaphysical plane, so God intervenes personally to shut the network down.”
I think there’s some confusion there between different plot devices in the Hyperion series. The farcaster network is shut down by people sabotaging it because they’ve realized it’s part of a plot against humanity by computers. What gets shut down by some godlike entity is the faster-than-light communication system.
@5 A Godlike entity also turns off a convenient transportation system in Bear’s *Eternity* (or more properly, orders humans to shut the system down – but who’s going to disobey the Eschaton).
Since you mentioned Rogue Moon: whenever McCoy in Star Trek complained that a teleportation system that disintegrates you at point A and assembles you at point B is an absurdly dangerous and potentially inaccurate thing that no one should use (but then used it anyway)—and whenever Star Trek had people suddenly realize that the transporter could produce an extra copy of a person—they were all about 300 years late, since Rogue Moon had made those issues clear right away. Everyone going into a teleporter in Rogue Moon knows that they’re technically dying and that the person coming out the other end is arguably not them, and they also figure out almost immediately that you can make two copies, which turns out to be convenient because the copies have a telepathic connection so you can use one of them as an expendable explorer.
An even bleaker take is Thomas Disch’s Echo Round His Bones (1967), probably his least-regarded SF novel but notable for finding a way to put people in an even worse situation than Rogue Moon. An extra copy is produced by every teleportation, but nobody knows that’s happening— since if you are the copy, you exist in a state where nobody in the regular world can perceive you (even though you can perceive them), and you can only survive on whatever air and supplies have also been copied.
13: In Langford’s The Space Eater, the Americans probably would have shut down their Anomalous Physics-based interstellar portal when they discovered side effects included destabilizing a significant fraction of the stars in the Milky Way but they discovered AP could facilitate the accidental conversion of matter to energy over a volume larger than the research facility before the light of the first triggered nova arrived.
The springers, in John Barnes’s A Million Open Doors, provide contact with far-flung terraformable planets that were settled by humans some time ago and are now easily reached by matter transmitter. The different settlements have vastly different cultures.
Nancy Kress Probability Trilogy.
The Enemy Stars had FTL teleporters [1] that had to be delivered by STL starship. Rather than risk pandemics from new worlds, they’d settle the worlds, then wait half a century to see if anyone survived. The teleporters were the destructively scan, replicate sort, so I expect a lot of people crammed through the devices to alien worlds believed they were being executed. The rulers were jerks so that may have been a plus from their perspective.
Has anyone written an SF legal story featuring destructive scanning teleportation in which a person argues that although they are identical to the person who committed a heinous crime, the fact is the original guilty person died when they stepped into the scanner? Should someone have to pay the price for a crime just because they happen to be identical to the culprit?
1: As I recall, the original FTL medium was gravity, which Anderson treated as instant (but in which frame?), then tachyons after the 1970 rewrite.
Salvage and Destroy by Edward Llewellyn (a pen name for Professor Llewellyn-Thomas) featured an alien civilization that was either in the process of becoming more efficient or collapsing. The core worlds of the Compact were connected by gates. Over time, beings would migrate from less desirable worlds to more desirable ones. Once the population of the less desirable worlds was low enough, their gate would be shut down. The result was an inexorable sorting of worlds into high-population, rich worlds a step away from each other, and low-population, poorer worlds accessible only by star ship.
Peter Hamilton
Jeffrey Thomas Punktown
Lloyd Biggle jr.’s Jan Darzek novels were based upon the premature discovery of teleportation technology on Earth, as I recall.
James Patrick Kelly Think like a dinosaur.
There’s probably no point to mentioning Larry Niven’s ‘Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Teleportation’, plus all the stories he wrote based on the teleportation booths, but I’ll mention it anyway.
Here are the four that come to mind, after The Stars My Destination which has been mentioned already:
John Brunner’s The Infinitive of Go which I think James touched on in another Tor post.
Larry Niven’s “Flash Crowd” and related stories, mostly collected in Red Tide I believe. His “Theory and Practice of Teleportation” essay, which I read in All the Myriad Ways while I was in high school, might be the first time I had been exposed to the concept of teleportation. (I may have read Heinlein’s “Lost Legacy” first.)
Steven Gould’s Jumper and its sequels.
Andrew J. Offutt’s The Galactic Rejects.
Ooh, another. Ray Brown’s “Reformed Sufi” series of stories, which only appeared in Analog. This trick used the destroy/transmit/rebuild method of teleportation, but in at least one of the stories, the way they get out of the identity crisis of teleportation is that the soul follows. And in accordance with some Sufi teaching somewhere, you are not born with a soul — you grow one. So before you walk into the teleporter, you need to be really sure you have one …
Peter F. Hamilton has a future where people travel between star systems by trains that never leave the ground, but pass through tunnels that have one end on each planet. I think that’s the coolest teleportation system ever.
I think the copy issue can be evaded by a twist forcing you to teleport all the quantities subject to conservation laws. At the origin of the teleport, the latter necessarily need to be destroyed because of conservation laws. Copy thus is prohibited at the origin as well as the destination for the same laws.
The only way out of that would be to create a full anti-copy, which, having exactly opposite properties, consists of the respective anti-particles. Not a good idea in any environment consisting of our kind of matter (but no worries, you won’t be given the time to realize the mistake).
Eli Bishop @14 — Pohl and Williamson’s Farthest Star features an instantaneous teleporter that creates a duplicate and leaves the original unharmed. The two aren’t linked. It’s useful for creating expendable explorers. Though the two are identical, they tend to think of themselves as “the lucky one who got to stay behind” and “the unlucky one who’s going to have a short and unpleasant remaining life”. They’re uniquely identified by changing the middle name of the remote copy, in alphabetical order for all known copies IIRC. That is, if Fred Johnson has been copied a total of ten times before, including some copies of copies, the next one will be something like Fred Kenneth Johnson regardless of which of the Freds he was copied from.
Fred Brown wrote a story in which duplicates were teleported to other planets – but the duplicates, though retaining the skills of the originals, didn’t have the consciences that their originals had. Oops.
It caught my attention that the cover of “Star Rider” explains that Jade, I assume they’re talking about Jade, is a a young girl with the sole power… and now I’m probably imagining the story very inaccurately.
I just reread The Stardroppers by John Brunner.
Heinlein: Tunnel in the Sky
Three of my favorites in my youth here at the top, so I picked up copies of the newer ones.
It’s good to see obscure old favorite books right alongside works from the last few years!
I see somebody already mentioned John Brunner’s The Infinitive of Go but I want to say a little about it anyway.
This book involves teleportation with less drawbacks than many of those mentioned here, but with one significant one:
People or things teleported by the device don’t arrive in the universe they started out from but arrive in a similar one; the receiver likewise gets something similar to what was sent, but from a teleporter in a different similar universe. The further the physical distance, the greater the differences in the universes and in what comes out the other side in our universe.
The protagonist does not figure this out for quite a while, particularly as the initial assumption is that the device has been making people insane when they teleport over long distances. Brunner does a nice job of developing the idea and some of its consequences. (Eventually the scientists realize they could be using it to communicate with other universes, possibly more advanced – after a false start with sending questions and getting back different questions, they start sending written answers and statements of what they’ve discovered through the device and begin getting back other useful answers and information.)
This is not one of his masterworks like Shockwave Rider or Stand on Zanzibar, but IMO one of the better of his nearly 100 workmanlike novels – I hesitate to call them pot-boilers because so many of them are actually good.
Joe Haldeman’s Mindbridge had interstellar teleportation as its mechanism for humanity’s exploration of the stars, but as I recall, anyone sent through the machinery got yanked back to their starting place after a certain amount of time at their destination.
Fred Brown had a teleportation device – skilled people were teleported to Mars, with the originals staying home. Unfortunately, the duplicates on Mars had no consciences, leading to plot complications.
One Step From Earth (1970) by Harry Harrison, is a collection of nine stories about teleportation from the first attempt to Mars, to a Milky Way spanning network, where we have ‘humans’ with six-digit hands, having replaced the five-digit species over the millennia.
You’re not the only one who didn’t realize what was going on in Walking to Aldebaran till just before the end.
In Way Station (1963) by Clifford Simak, the original of the teletransport left behind is dead, is liquified by acids and flushed into a container beneath the station
See also The Unteleported Man. And I’m surprised no one has mentioned A Wrinkle in Time.
So nice to see Alan Nourse and Kevin O’Donnell mentioned. Both fine authors who deserve to be better remembered.
@27: The movie is the usual hack job done by a production team afraid of storytelling, but Jumper, the original book, is lovely. For those who haven’t read it: It’s a coming-of-age tale about a real 17-year-old boy with real 17-year-old problems and fallibilities and also a superpower that everybody wants to use.
Wildside, by the same author, is similarly satisfying.
Pauline Gedge’s Stargate (no relation).
Alfred Bester – The Stars My Destination
If you want a lot more detail about the subject then look up the thesis by Sean Williams entitled
The “Murdering Twinmaker”: Putting Into Context an Overlooked Icon of Science Fiction.
“The concept of instantaneous travel by imaginary technologies has been a key trope in science fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present day, made iconic by Star Trek’s imperative ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ but under-examined in critical literature. This exegesis examines the rise (and fall) of the matter transmitter as a motif and metaphor in British and American science fiction, and its implications for reflecting upon social, scientific and technological change.”