Few headlines thrill like “‘Counterportation’: Quantum breakthrough paves way for world-first experimental wormhole.” The article itself delivers, raising the possibility that “disembodied transport (…) without any detectable information carriers” may prove to be physically realizable.
Teleportation by another name is still teleportation.1
Particularly for those of us who routinely find themselves sharing public transport with fellow travellers as maskless as they are prone to alarming hacking coughs, the prospect of technology that would deliver us from A to B without traversing the space between is a welcome one. True, counterportation appears uncomfortably close to The Enemy Stars’ disintegration-inducing scanning and remote duplication. Still, whether convenience may compensate for a transportation method indistinguishable from serial self-destruction is a personal matter.
For SF authors, technological teleportation’s utility as a plot-enabler is so clear that it was hard for me choose which works to mention out of so many possibilities.2 I finally came up with five, drawn from across six decades, from the semi-mythical 1960s (now so long ago that few who remember the period are still alive) to the considerably more recent 2020s.
All the Colors of Darkness by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (1963)
The Universal Transmitting Company has a simple dream: provide the Earth of the mid-1980s with facilities that would allow travellers to step from city to city or continent to continent in a single stride. The business would be instantly profitable and the founders able to sit back and rake in the dough.
This elegant plan is straightforward in concept. In practice, the project has met impediment after impediment. Why, it’s almost as if the Universal Transmitting Company had a very determined enemy.
Called in to investigate, private detective Jan Darzek can easily imagine any number of established concerns who might want to prevent commercial teleportation or at least weaken UTC sufficiently that it would be ripe for a hostile takeover. His error is to assume the culprit is Terrestrial, an oversight he rethinks…once he finds himself imprisoned in an alien base on the Moon.
Jan Darzek is an exceptionally lucky example of his kind, in that his opponents are neither malicious nor casually homicidal towards excessively inquisitive detectives. Consequently, once his opponents grasp Darzek’s potential, he experiences what may be the most spectacular upward career arc in PI history.
“A Kind of Murder” by Larry Niven (1974)
JumpShift made the Earth a very small place. There is nowhere Jeffrey Walters could flee where his obsessed ex-wife Alicia Walters could not easily follow. Thus Jeffrey is at the head of the list of suspects who might have wanted to kill Alicia. As far as the police can determine, Jeffrey has an iron-clad alibi…. Or does he?
This story and the others in the sequence of stories to which it belong have their origins in Niven’s 1969 speculative essay “Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Teleportation.” The sequence would be interesting as a model of how to approach creativity. One cannot help but notice that many of the social phenomena about which Niven speculated eventually manifested in analogous form online—in this case, the relentless stalker exploiting technology maliciously.
Aventine by Lee Killough (1981)
An abundance of Earthlike worlds combined with interstellar-range teleportation facilitates planetary specialization. Aventine sees itself as the artists’ world, a planet where creativity of all forms is not merely tolerated but encouraged. This flattering self-image is one that would not stand up to close examination.
An objective observer might point out that Aventine is less about art and more about catering to the whims and desires of the extremely wealthy. Decadence and self-indulgence, encouraged by persons reluctant to say no, can be a wonderful source of memorable stories…but not for the happiness of those being cosseted.
Aventine belongs to a select subgenre: works about the decadent rich that I suspect were inspired by J. G. Ballard’s lushly decadent Vermillion Sands (1971). The late Edward Bryant’s Cinnabar (1976) would be another. Do any others come to mind?
Glasshouse by Charles Stross (2006)
The creators of the facility at the centre of Glasshouse’s plot exploit an obvious implication of technological teleportation. If society is dependent on ubiquitous teleportation, and if that teleportation requires machinery at both ends of the trip, then any given location can be utterly isolated simply by denying it access to the necessary devices.
For reasons that appear compelling at the time, recent memory-wipe subject Robin agrees to participate in a social experiment. Not only could the project advance the cause of science, it will provide Robin with a new identity and undisclosed location far from the assassins who may be in hot pursuit. Once ensconced in the isolated test facility, Robin belatedly begins to suspect the purpose of the project may not be what was promised. Escape without access to teleports will prove challenging.
Whereas teleportation that requires only a transmitter is a fine recipe for geopolitical instability (at any moment, your enemy could teleport an A-bomb into your lap), Glasshouse’s style lends itself to control wrapped in an appearance of freedom. Any destination with a listed teleporter is only a step away, but those without a teleporter might as well not exist.
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley (2020)
Having freed the people of Earth from the burdens of democracy and prosperity, the great corporations now provide Dietz with lifetime employment: The war against the rebel human colony of Mars! Inspired by the destruction of Sao Paulo (blamed on the Martians) to enlist in a corporate army, Dietz will confront enemies as often as it takes to eliminate them or for Dietz to be eliminated.
Key to the exercise: interplanetary range teleportation. Soldiers are converted to light, then back to matter elsewhere. The process has known flaws, not least of which is the risk of fatal reassembly mishaps. As Dietz discovers, there are undisclosed bugs as well, one of which condemns Dietz to experience time out of sequence. This provides Dietz with a wider perspective on corporate goals—a perspective the bosses would prefer minions not to have.
Hurley’s teleportation is memorably unreliable, as able to scramble anatomy as to deliver said anatomy to Mars. Scrambling is generally fatal. Readers may wonder why anyone would use the technology. This is because the powers that be have invested a lot of effort making sure the individual preferences of cogs like Dietz play no role in politics. As it turns out, their governmental processes are as unreliable as teleportation.
***
This is, of course, a very small sample of a very large field. Perhaps I overlooked your favourite examples. This was due to lack of room or simple oversight, not a deliberate snub. Nevertheless, feel free to add to the list in comments, which 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]Obviously the authors of the paper about counterportation disagree or they would not have used the word they did.
[2]Between first and final draft, I encountered yet another teleportation classic: “Rogue Moon” by Algis Budrys.
First one I thought of was The Stars My Destination.
Kris Neville’s obscure “Thyre Planet” is set on a world where every so often the teleportation system fails and the people don’t arrive. The story concerns a bureaucratically messed up attempt to solve the problem — with the head bureaucrat trying NOT to solve it because he figures he’ll keep getting paid as long as the problem needs a solution. But eventually it IS solved — with a surprising result. (Nyy gur crbcyr (naq nyvraf) jub jrer fghpx va gur gryrcbegngvba flfgrz neevir ng gurve vagraqrq qrfgvangvbaf ng bapr (nsgre univat jnvgrq n irel ybat gvzr va fbzr pnfrf.)
Wil McCathy’s Collapsium books (and stories) feature teleportation via copying, which can result in either copying errors, or problems like multiple copies of the same person showing up, and other economic problems, and McCarthy intelligently explores a lot of these issues.
I love your vintage reviews ;)
The thing I like about Niven’s teleportation stories is that he insists on the conservation of momentum and energy.Large changes in altitude or latitude have consequences. Of course, he had to come up with a workaround to be able to write interesting stories about the social effects of teleportation, but at least he thought about it.
Actually, his first teleportation story was “By Mind Alone” in the June 1966 issue of IF. You can probably guess from the title how the teleportation is achieved. That story has never been collected and only has a handful of foreign language reprints, so he must not think much of it.
And that story also relies on conservation of energy & momentum, although it’s a last-page “surprise ending”.
https://archive.org/details/1966-06_IF/page/150/mode/1up
When I think of teleportation, Stephen King’s The Jaunt always comes to mind.
John Brunner’s The Infinitive of Go features teleportation at its heart. Like Stross’ Glasshouse, it requires a transmitter and receiver, and like Hurley’s The Light Brigade things can go “wrong.” Spoilers coming: The process not only teleports you between two different booths, but into another reality. So the teleport “reads” your mind and finds a reality that fits your mind, needs, desires better. And the farther the teleportation, the more drastic the difference. As when an injured construction worker is teleported from orbit to a hospital and comes out as a baboon. Well, what humans would have looked like if they’d evolved from baboons. Things get interesting from there.
Brunner had another teleportation novel, The Web of Everywhere, which belongs to that special set of SF novels I read after dropping a 100 kg rock on my hand playing cards. As I recall, Web is much darker than Go: one of the side effects of cheap teleportation was that regional problems became global, for which coping skills were lacking.
dropping a 100 kg rock on my hand playing cards
As one does.
There was a story by, I think, Clarke where the Martians threatened to glass Earth if we didn’t give up space travel and Earth secretly developed teleportation and hit Mars first. It was written in the form of various letters sent between people
There are, of course Star Trek‘s ubiquitous transporters, but also Kevin O’Donnell Jr’s flinger network from the McGill Feighan books, and David Weber’s Mat-Trans from the Dahak books (especially book 3).
Llewellyn’s Salvage and Destroy has a teleportation-driven evaporative process going on, where population concentrates on the best worlds, with the undesirable worlds dropped from the network. Is this collapse or improved efficiency?
Today is National First Contact Day in honor of STAR TREK. So, may all your teleporters be attached to a Federation ship with a Vulcan at the controls.
Another story is James Patrick Kelly’s Think Like a Dinosaur. His method of teleportation creates a duplicate at the other end, while leaving the original still present. But the aliens who gave humanity the technology require the “equation to be balanced’ by killing the original.
Makes note for a future Tor piece about aliens who are giant jerks.
@0: I still love the Jan Darzek books; AFAICT the Suck Fairy has no more than nibbled around the edges (originally very limited parts for women, although Darzek’s “assistant” becomes more and more active) and the plots all worked.
@8: Thanks for the reminder! I remembered the story by your description; from the subject headings attached to it in ISFDB, I think the story is “Loophole“
@12: cf the movie version of The Prestige? The results in the book are quite different, but similarly bleak.
Steven Gould’s Jumper stories propose an interesting hazard to teleportation: if you’re the only one who can do it, people with many other resources are going to want to harness you for their purposes. NB: there is no movie of these books.
ISTR our host has recently mentioned The Universe Between (making it ineligible for his list), in which teleportation involves passing through higher dimensions that break most people’s sanity.
I think the issue with the Universe Between was with adult minds. Kids could adapt.
John Barnes’s A Million Open Doors is set in a universe where Earth colonized many worlds by space travel, each world more or less based on an Earth culture it grew from (some of them rather … niche), and each world pretty much isolated when the colonization effort stopped. Now the “springer,” a matter transmitter, has been invented and can be used to put the planets back in contact with each other. Which has its cultural and diplomatic challenges.
Think like a dinosaur.
Carolyn Ives Gilman.
Joan D. Vinge’s poignant “The Crystal Ship.” I can’t say much for fear of spoilers.
For the military SF minded, I believe John Dalmas’ Regiment series involves mercenary armies that can use teleportation doors to get where they’re going.
@@.-@ The Internet Archive has the June, 1966 Worlds of If.
https://archive.org/details/1966-06_IF/
I can kind of see why Niven hasn’t reprinted “By Mind Alone”- it’s mostly just an illustration of the conservation laws he later incorporated into stories.
Not that different in principle from “Neutron Star”, I guess, but Beowulf Shaeffer is a more compelling character to spend time with while he figures things out.
In Julian May’s Exiles / Galactic Milieu series, teleportation was rare but possible (also dangerous).
@14 Although, oddly enough, Steven Gould wrote a book based on the nonexistent movie (supposedly) based on his books.
Lee Killough got some great covers.
The Unteleported Man by Philip K Dick– all I remember about it is a main character who refuses to use teleportation even though everyone else thinks it’s normal. Possibly he was right about it.
Aldebaran’s great okay, Algol’s pretty neat, Betelgeuse’s pretty girls, Will knock you off your feet.
They’ll do anything you like, Real fast and then real slow, But if you have to take me apart to get me there, Then I don’t want to go.
Singing, take me apart, take me apart, What a way to roam. And if you have to take me apart to get me there, I’d rather stay at home.
Sirius is paved with gold, So I’ve heard it said, By nuts who then go on to say, “See Tau before you’re dead”,
I’ll gladly take the high road, Or even take the low, But if you have to take me apart to get me there, Then I for one won’t go.
Singing, take me apart, take me apart, You must be off your head, And if you try to take me apart to get me there, I’ll stay right here in bed.
I teleported home one night, With Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie’s heart away, And I got Sidney’s leg.”
James Blish’s Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die!, rather prominently featured the dangers of teleportation – and, iirc, there was a rather intriguing argument between McCoy and Spock about whether or not it was the same person emerging at the end of the teleportation process. Spock’s conclusion: “Since it makes no difference, it does not matter”. McCoy, needless to say, felt otherwise….
I second “The Jaunt.” That story still terrifies me.
“Think Like A Dinosaur” was also a really eerie episode of the rebooted Outer Limits series. Recommended viewing.
I would also submit Peter Clines’ The Fold. It’s a quasi sequel to 14. I’ve read it a few times and the reveal, plus all of its implications still gets me.
Edit: Oh, and about the Jumper series. Yes, Mr. Gould wrote “Jumper: Griffin’s Story” as a sorta movie tie-in. It doesn’t share the same continuity with the series, and I would not recommend it (or the movie). The Jumper series (Jumper, Reflex, Impuse, and Exo) is fantastic.
In Janet Edwards’s Earth Girl, the portal network essentially permits travel anywhere in the universe – as long as you are one of the overwhelming majority of people whose physiology is compatible with those destinations. The primary source of conflict in the book is that some people cannot survive in those distant locations – so they are earthbound and generally looked down on by the rest of humanity.
Since there’s no fixed frame of reference in the universe, any teleportation can be viewed by some observer as time travel, and vice versa.
@27 – I believe the exact formulation of what someone in the book ironically called “McCoy’s Law” was, “A difference which makes no difference is no difference.”
@30 Niven’s teleportation (at least in the stories I recall where it was relevant) operated at the speed of light. The doubletalk analogy shifted from “electrons crossing a tunnel diode” to “the payload is turned into a super-neutrino” (I think this was when neutrinos were still thought to be possibly without rest mass) to reconcile the payload being undetectable during transit with conservation laws. (Of mass-energy, at least.) So the interstellar starship isn’t a time machine via ftl shenanigans.
Though from the POV of the crew in “All The Bridges Rusting” they’re instantly as far in the future as there are light years in the trip. Especially inconvenient when their destination turns out to be inhospitable (Niven’s futures tend not to have good space telescopes and automated probes are unreliable) and the crew gets reflected back to Sol without seeing their destination system.
So it is a forward time machine in a sense, but not a very convenient one. (You need a dropship half as many light years away as you want to go forward.)
Not sure where Glasshouse-style teleport gates end and wormhole travel begins, other than you’ve already done one of these on wormholes.
Neal Asher’s Polity and Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth civilizations both rely heavily on the instantaneous travel of wormhole gateways, though the Polity’s runcibles need receivers and the Commonwealth’s wormholes are indeed useful for one-way delivery of fusion bombs and other holiday treats.
Re. mass/ kinetic energy conservation: in a few stories it’s expressly necessary for the object being teleported to switch places with an object of equal mass at the intended destination. The Terry Pratchett Discworld novel “Interesting Times” plays this for laughs.
@15: TV Tropes supports your interpretation of “The Universe Between” but what I thought I remembered was that the first story had an unusual teenaged girl, written as something like autistic, who could tolerate the fourth dimension, but not really explain it. Apparently she grows out of that because in part two she has raised a teenaged son. So I took that as a hereditary compatibility with the fourth dimension. Am I remembering the right book?
Right book. I think we differ only in interpretation of events.
Disch’s Echo Round His Bones. I didn’t know it was first serialized.
Did anyone mention the Heinlein juvenile Tunnel in the Sky yet?
I think The Fly – the 86 version- needs an honorable mention, seeing as the Jeff Goldblum’s transformation is caused by a fly getting stuck in the transportation chamber.
Piers Anthony’s Macroscope has a shift from a peaceful galaxy with information exchange via ftl communication to war when ftl teleportation becomes possible.
In The Punch Escrow (Tal M. Klein), rather than literally transporting people, teleportation recreates them at their destinations and then destroys their earlier selves. Thanks to a complicated series of events, the hero’s previous body isn’t killed, and there are now two of him running around……
Since the topic began as dangerous teleportation: the sites of Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel and its sequels are the ruins left by interstellar teleportation — IIRC because the inventors discovered that it was in fact a sort of time travel and decided to meddle in their pasts. (I recall reading one of her few pieces of short fiction showing the crash itself rather than the aftermath, but I’m blanking on the title.) Morgaine’s mission is to make a last jump through each gate, closing it behind her.
@41: I believe that The Man in the Moon Must Die by Jeff Bredenberg uses the same premise as well. (The book begins with the narrator preparing to teleport from the Earth to the Moon, only to find his original self still on Earth and undestroyed, and his new copy presumably running around on the Moon.)
Michael Crichton’s “Timeline” should be considered, the time travel was an additional feature for a technology designed for matter transport. Instantaneous delivery! Be VERY SURE the coordinates to be delivered to are clear!
In the TV Series Dark Matter, the function of teleportation is filled by transmitting the subject’s memories and personalities via subspace into a short-lived clone (while the subject themself sleeps in a pod). The clone carries out their business, then returns to the facility to transmit the new memories back to the subject (after which being of no further use the clone is disposed of).
This lends itself to a few interesting plotpoints – the most notable of which is that if the clone dies before returning to the facility, the subject is woken up safe and sound but with no idea of what happened to their clone.
China Mieville has a lovely take on the question of whether Star-Trek transporters are really death-and-rebirth devices in Kraken, where a minor character with a Star-Trek obsession magically creates a transporter. It turns out the death-and-re-creation hypothesis is correct, and the poor fellow is haunted by dozens of ghosts of his dead prior self from every time he used the transporter.
@38 – nope, I came here to do it, but you beat me to it.
Some years ago I reviewed what I submit is both the most obscure (never reprinted) and the most ridiculous teleportation story on the books:
The lead novelette honored on the cover of [Science Fantasy] 10 is J.T. McIntosh’s “Five into Four,” and McIntosh’s thinking continues to rub me the wrong way. There’s a matter transmission accident, and five people set out from Mars to Earth but only four arrive. The negligent technician is brought up on homicide charges. But wait! The four lucky survivors all realize that they are subtly… changed. So the fifth traveler wasn’t lost. He was merely redistributed into the other four.
Charges are dropped, since the alleged victim is still alive, sort of, and the survivors all commence new lives, the leaven of new personality being just what they needed. (There is no mention of any weight gain.) But the idea that a redistribution of matter would result in a redistribution of personality (or anything else other than a nasty explosion) is silly beyond words.
Death Qualified, the first of Kate Wilhelm’s many Barbara Holloway books, centers around a mathematical researcher who suddenly start popping around in a way that anyone who sees him finds extremely disturbing. I’m a little disappointed that Wilhelm never followed up on that, although it’s unclear how anyone would.
My favorite teleportation book is probably the one that starts with the classic line “It was a dark and stormy night.”
49) Death Qualified is a wonderful novel, and I always felt it deserved more notice in the SF world (which isn’t to say it was ignored, mind you, just that its status as a mystery novel — and the first in a (quite good) mystery series — seemed to overshadow its really excellent science fictional side.
Space-ship scale teleportation is a main driver of action in Tayler’s webcomic Schlock Mercenary. For all recorded galactic history interstellar travel happens through the gate network, built and maintained by the Gatekeepers. Then someone invents a much simpler way of moving between places. And we learn the Gatekeeper approach was a copy and rebuild style teleportation — and they kept a copy for themselves to make sure they knew everything that was going on. And it keeps ramping up from there.
@48: That sounds like “The Quatermass Experiment” (Xperiment in the film), but that is an early manned British space rocket which went up with three men and came down with one… who displays characteristics of all three men… and, well, check out the story.
John Byrne’s superhero comics character “Babe” is a tall, strong, amnesiac woman who was actually four women blended together by, I’ve forgotten, aliens, magic, whichever. Then they got separated… and then alien magicked together again for the next story, and so on.
Victorian American puzzle publisher Sam Loyd, celebrated in one or more of Martin Gardner’s book collections of columns in “Scientific American”, produced enigmas “Get Off the Earth”, and “Teddy and the Lions” – for President Roosevelt – mostly the same thing. A disc is pinned on a board, and thirteen Chinese warriors, or seven hunters and seven lions, are drawn along the interface between the disc and the board. Then you turn the disc around the pin, and you have eight lions and six hunters, or you have twelve warriors instead of thirteen. You can see it online. Where did the missing hunter and the missing warrior go? In fact, all of the original characters are gone. They are decomposed and the pieces are assembled into new, different, probably fatter figures.
And Star Trek had “Tuvix”.
And “My Brother’s Keeper” by Charles Sheffield, where I think what happens is that mild-mannered Lionel Salkind’s life is saved after he and his wild identical twin Leo’s private plane flight crashes, by transplanting some of Leo’s brain into the survivor. Then Lionel has to deal with Leo’s sinister enemies, with confusing incomplete information from Leo’s brain.
I suppose I’m saying this happens more often than you think.
I’m almost a week late to this, and I see someone brought up Schlock Mercenary (a criminally underrated series IMO). But it looks like no one’s mentioned Ian Stewart’s syntei books Living Labyrinth and Rockstar. Living Labyrinth is a fix up from the 80’s and 90’s where a group of star travelers are stranded on a world where wormholes occur naturally and this is incorporated into the local biology to terrifying effect.
To make it more interesting there are humans there from a list colony. And they’ve had millennia to get used to this.
Rockstar had or surviving heroes get rescued and wormhole teleportation makes it out into the wider interstellar polity and really shakes things up. Highly recommended.
Early in Howard Tayler’s webcomic Schlock Mercenary, we learn (I forget how) that the interstellar jumpgate system is not what it seems.
Coming to this discussion very late, but here’s one nobody’s mentioned: Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman. (1976). Teleportation is possible, even to distant worlds light-years away, but after a certain amount of time the traveller involuntarily teleports back. Just the traveller. Anything picked up or consumed by the traveller does not return with her. This makes it a little bit useless and also dangerous, sometimes fatal. But if a woman becomes pregnant while on a distant world, the baby becomes part of that world, and does not return. I may be misremembering somewhat.