Most SF authors love ubiquitous teleportation and planetary range communications until the plot of their latest work depends on being stuck in one place or being unable to call for help. Writers—not just SF writers—have wrestled with this and related issues1 for decades. Here are five ways authors have avoided being painted into a corner by the technology available to their characters.2
The Kinsey Millhone solution
It might seem counterintuitive to mention a mundane mystery character here, rather than focusing on the speculative…but this case is so apropos that I cannot refrain. The widespread adoption of cellphones (not to mention the internet: see next entry) rendered a number of stock mystery plot elements obsolete.3 Sue Grafton’s solution was to set all twenty-five Kinsey Millhone novels in the 1980s, before plot-destroying communications technology became widespread.
The Net of a Million Lies solution
Just because one has easy access to a planetary or even galactic network does not mean that one will be able to find reliable information on it, or that one will understand the significance of the few nuggets of truth one finds amid the dross. Vernor Vinge’s now quite venerable A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) touches on this: efforts to resolve a galactic-scale existential threat are complicated by energetic disinformation campaigns, as well as by problems posed by translation issues. The truth is out there…but so are plausible lies and misunderstandings, all of which greatly outweigh the truth.
The Future Is Unevenly Distributed solution
It takes time for new technologies, no matter how convenient, to become available everywhere. This can be particularly true of items dependent on some external infrastructure, like a mobile phone network, the internet, or even the humble road. In the backstory to Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan stories, the planet Barrayar has been isolated for centuries due to the collapse of a local wormhole4 on which interstellar travel depends. Technology commonplace elsewhere was unknown on Barrayar, because there was no way to reach Barrayar and thus no way to import innovations.
The Subspace Storm solution
No technology is one hundred percent reliable. Local or transient conditions may preclude use. A notable example comes from vintage television: Star Trek’s transporter was both a convenience for the writers (no need for time-consuming, expensive special effects showing shuttle craft landing each episode) and a curse (the characters are never more than a hasty communicator call away from being snatched from the jaws of danger). A frequent solution was some form of interference preventing communicators or transporters (or both) from working for as long as the plot required.
The Sky Is Full of Wolves solution
Many forms of technology produce recognizable signatures over surprising distances.5 If one has good reason to believe enemies will use those signatures to target one, then strongly discouraging use of those technologies is simple self-preservation. In Paul McAuley’s Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), the so-called Enemy avoids using faster-than-light drives. Such drives are visible over tens of thousands of light years and the Enemy fear alerting the marauders at the galactic core to their hiding place. Alas, nobody warned humans about this issue, which is why humans use FTL drives in abundance.
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These are only a few of the coping mechanisms and strategies authors have embraced in order to work around potentially inconvenient tech. Perhaps I’ve missed your favourites. If so, feel free to mention them 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]One related issue is that readers have more time to think about ingenious ways to apply fictional advanced technology than do authors while writing stories. Perfectly reasonable applications may be absent because the author simply didn’t think of them before the piece went to print. See, for example, any number of ways William Gibson characters could have (but didn’t) keep Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics from melting their frontal lobes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer).
[2]By the mid-1970s, Larry Niven worried in print that Known Space was so abundantly filled with problem-solving technology, not least of which was breeding for luck, that the setting had become unusable: thus, his story “Safe at Any Speed,” in which calamities become minor inconveniences thanks to reliable technology. Despite his concerns, he did manage to write more Known Space stories.
[3]It just so happens that I started doing professional reviewing just after mobile phones became common, so I was able to watch as authors developed coping mechanisms. These days, mobiles have been around so long that authors have no problem incorporating them into their worldview.
[4]Niven’s 1973 “The Alibi Machine” offers an amusing variation, in which the ubiquity of reliable teleportation renders a miscreant incapable of envisioning a solution that doesn’t involve it—even very basic, extremely obvious solutions like walking from one house to another.
[5]Recognizable event visible across interstellar distances: exo-atmospheric nuclear explosions, which can in theory be spotted across the Milky Way. Nuclear wars featuring high altitude explosions to induce EMP could alert aliens across the galaxy that at one time, Earth was home to a civilization capable of making nuclear weapons. I don’t know if any SETI programs have focused on looking for bursts of signals characteristic of global thermonuclear exchanges.
SETI probably hasn’t gone looking for electromagnetic signals indicative of global thermonuclear exchanges. It would be such a small window, and even if you found something there would be little likelihood of being able to communicate with anyone. Maybe that solves the Fermi paradox. The aliens picked up on Operation Fishbowl, but when there were no more high-altitude bursts after that, they concluded we’d wiped ourselves out and wrote us off.
Niven may have concluded that advanced safety features made further Known Space stories impossible in the mid-70s, but he wrote “Safe at Any Speed” in 1967 when the title was a more current reference. As I recall, he does make an explicit connection between the two in an introduction somewhere. He got around it by just setting all his other stories before the date of the story.
Dumb question no doubt, but why are nuclear explosions detectable so far out? This close in to a star, I’d have naively thought it was like lighting a match next to a spotlight.
Last week’s issue of The Economist had an article on SETI that describes a couple of approaches that might pick up nukes going off.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/01/18/ideas-for-finding-et-are-getting-more-inventive
If I ever run a Traveller game, it will be set in the future of the years the Little Black Books were written in. Computers, in particular, will either be big, expensive, and dumb, or high end magic the PCs will not get their hands on.
As I recall, GURPS Lensmen had the added detail that the Arisians interfered to steer the peoples in Civilization away from solid state electronics, to protect them from undesirable forays into AI.
For point (1) (and footnote [3]) I should just like to name-check the delightful Dead Air, by the late Iain Banks—a non-SF crime novel set in 2001, right after 9/11, where the plot can only work because everyone has a working cellphone.
If computers are people, that means that they can lie.
Or computers can just be unreliable because programmers have a habit of saying “that’s good enough, looks like it works” and then building another layer on top of that.
To be fair to Sue Grafton, ‘A is for Alibi’ is copyright 1986, so setting it in the ’80s probably seemed natural to her…
When they changed from contemporary to historical is a whole other question…
7: 24, for all its many, many, many, so very many problematic aspects, was interesting to me because it was one of the first suspense series I encountered that embraced the plot possibilities of the cell phone.
I guess this falls under “the future is unevenly distributed”: there are mobile phones in Space Cadet, which like landlines in the 1950s cannot be turned off (1). The solution for teens who do not want to get calls from home is to claim the phone was stored in luggage and could not be heard.
1: This was the cause of a long-running argument between Heinlein and his phone company. Heinlein wanted the ringer off when he was working. The phone company refused to allow this on a phone they owned. I think the compromise was that a phone with a ringer was located in the garage where Heinlein couldn’t hear it.
While writing GURPS: Lensman, Sean Barrett told me the point of Lensmen was they were to be the heirs of the Arisians. This meant the only tools needed were the powers of the mind.
This required some frantic retcon from Mr. Barrett. E.g., how can the Lensmen evolve mastery of language when every blasted smartphone has a spellchecker?
Mr. Barrett’s solution was the Arisians suppressed the invention of transistors and digital electronics. Instead, ultra-wave tubes became the basis of Civilization’s technology.
Re: Transporters. I think the main reason for the Transporter was that Roddenberry used to write for cop shows, and was used to having a short scene of the cop car on the road. But not all cop shows did that. Dragnet would only have scenes in a car if there was plot relevant info to be delivered. Otherwise Friday would say “Let’s go to X” cut to a short shot of X, and Friday and Gannon walk into shot.
That would have worked for Star Trek. Kirk says “Let’s go the planet’s surface, cut to a stock scene of the Shuttle passing in front of a planet, cut to Kirk and crew getting out of the shuttle on the surface. You only worry about showing the shuttle leaving the Enterprise once every 5 episodes of so. Would have solved the Get Out Of Jail Free problem with the transporter.
I am reminded of how in the Dresden Files, a cell phone is a thing that can be fried simply by being held by a wizard. As a result, none of them have modern communications or, for that matter, internet.
Which is why in the ending of one of the later books, Harry is very freaked out that Molly, now Winter Maiden, is able to use one just fine…
I think there was an implication in “Angel” that the main character, born in the 19th century, never really got the hang of modern technology like cellphones.
Nancy Kress wrote a novel in which a future development made murder mysteries untenable, so (in-universe) there’s a note to the effect that authors often write in a universe similar to their own, but in which that development didn’t occur.
@12: Rivers of London also has powered semiconductors fried by magic.
There’s the Doctor Who solution, which is to toss in a line about deadlock seals or vortex interference or fixed points in time and you’re golden.
Did Connie Willis ever give any reason for the lack of mobile (cell) phones in the future of her time-travelling historians? I found those tales increasingly irritating (historians who seemed to know very little relevant history, an organisation that seemed incapable of organising anything, and simple factual errors), but this one particularly irked me. Understandable that the phones’ real-world introduction after the series began appearing was problematic for the author, but was any explanation ever given? Admittedly I eventually gave up reading the series and my irritation may have caused me to overlook some revelation, but I am vaguely curious whether the point was addressed.
@9 – Couldn’t Heinlein simply have silenced the ringer by unplugging the phone or leaving the receiver off the hook? Or was this a point of principle for him?
@17 First thing that popped into my mind when reading that was how easy a simple on/off light switch could be spliced into the line from the wall. Flip off while working and back on when done.
@17: possibly he had an early answering machine, which required that the phone not be outright disabled. Possibly he preferred that callers get a non-answer rather than a busy signal. Being cantankerous, as you hint, is also possible.
17: As I recall how phones worked back then, the customer didn’t own the phone, the Phone Company did. The Phone Company was extremely reluctant to give in to customer requests or allow customers to use phones in a manner other than the one the Phone Company deemed correct. As well, having as they did a monopoly in their region, the Phone Company tended not to have anything resembling negotiation skills because as far as they were concerned they did not need them [1]. Disabling the ringer might have caused the company to end phone service to the customer in question.
Having accidentally knocked phones off their cradles, I know from experience what they used to do was emit a loud, annoying sound to alert the customer to the fact the phone was off the hook. I don’t know if that sound stopped after enough time.
1: In Canada, the Phone Company was Bell Canada and they acted with such confidence that decades after their monopoly ended, I know ex-customers who absolutely refuse to do business with them. Many Canadians my age have at least one Bell Canada story.
My favourite Bell story was from when they were worried maybe their monopoly would end. To show people how bad it would be, they commissioned ads in which, to quote IMDB’s entry for actor Ted Zeigler “a nerdy man named Neller (…) decided to start his own phone company (NellerPhone), which he would do with total amateur incompetence in each ad.” Rumour had it the ads series was yanked when Bell started getting calls asking for Neller’s number, because some people felt a nincompoop was preferable to Bell Canada.
That IMDB entry is about the only evidence I’ve seen that confirms my memory the ads even existed. The ad campaign seems to have been buried deep.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0954342/bio
@20 – Lilly Tomlin “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”
@16: “an organisation that seemed incapable of organising anything”
I think Connie Willis was on to something. It might be another solution for the list. Sure we keep developing awesome new technologies, but usually we misuse technology and fail to realize the benefits.
@17 I don’t think phones necessarily unplugged then. Per a thread on its history, the four-pronged jack came out in the 1930s but some posters remembered their home phones being hardwired to the baseboard till the 1960s. The plastic modular jack came out in 1968.
As for messing with *the Phone Company’s wires* by installing a switch, look up “Hush-a-phone”: they were willing to take legal action over attaching a temporary plastic device to the handset to muffle sound. My dad, who worked in utility regulation, recounted their taking action to prevent a company from distributing plastic covers for phone books, because they might obscure vital information.
Touching the wires would probably have led to police intervention. I’m not kidding. Pretty much anything was, by their lights, a threat to the integrity of the entire phone system, and until the 1970s the courts and regulatory authorities were inclined to go along with them.
And as James notes, a phone left off the hook was the opposite of quiet. AT&T was in the business of getting calls *through*, dammit.
@16 Never mind cell phones, IIRC Willis’s future didn’t have answering machines. Or call waiting. The phone system was inferior in plot important ways to what was common when I read the the book on publication. It works for a screwball comedy like To Say Nothing of the Dog, but it makes The Doomsday Book something of a screwball tragedy.
I still find it affecting, but I have to suspend my disbelief on comms. And also on any university sending one! unaccompanied! undergrad! to the Middle Ages. (Grad students may be expendable, but undergrads are tuition-paying units, and even in the pre-helicopter days I think parents might have had something to say.)
For an interesting take on a “Sky Is Full of Wolves” scenario, one might try Cixin Liu’s “The Dark Forest” (Book 2 of the Three Body Problem trilogy; Book 3 examines the idea further as I recall).
On mobile phones: it’s almost a commonplace of modern horror films that they take place somewhere you can’t get a reliable signal. Top marks for misdirection, therefore, to Hot Fuzz, which has a sequence of closeups of phone screens early on that make it clear that Sandford, Gloucestershire is a mobile phone black spot, a fact which has pretty much zero relevance to the development of the rest of the plot.
Per a thread on its history, the four-pronged jack came out in the 1930s but some posters remembered their home phones being hardwired to the baseboard till the 1960s. The plastic modular jack came out in 1968.
In the UK some home phones at least were still hardwired into the wall until the late 1980s.
In my US college in 1989 the hall phones were still hardwired, at least in some dormitories. When some drunk idiot pulled the one in our hall off the wall I had a heck of a time getting it reconnected.
In many of Alistair MacLean’s adventure novels involving military or covert operations by small groups, he frequently contrived in the early chapters to have the radio broken and the sole radio-operator killed, so the team would be completely on its own.
A variant of #4: the interference that disables your technology need not be a natural phenomenon. Although I suppose in that case it’s more of making the technology *part* of the storytelling, because people who relied on that technology are going to ask “who did this and why?”.
If you’re used to being a single mind operating a dozen or more bodies, having your communications jammed can be very disorienting. Especially if you didn’t even know that was possible.
@1: Interstellar nuclear explosion detection should be called “The ‘Ow!’ Signal”, but apparently it isn’t.
There’s a sixth way: the “Technology Defeats Technology” solution. So, if you want to have interstellar travel, but still have people fighting with swords rather than zap guns, just explain that your magic-tech shield interacts with your magic-tech zap gun to produce an atomic explosion.
Or explain that the teraport instantaneous drive is incredibly convenient and useful, but every inhabited solar system has built a teraport denial array to stop people just teraporting a big warhead into their capital cities, so you still need spaceships.
@32: Indeed. And in Schlock Mercenary, which is AFAIK the only place where it’s called a “teraport”, there’s yet another level: Teraport cages, which shiel a small area inside a TAD field to allow teraporting after all, but only a little bit before they’re detected and shut down.
(I think I also remember that the TAD fields working by basically scrambled anything coming in or out, which meant that they weren’t a particularly effective defense against someone Teraporting in hot plasma.)
@28 I think our college hall phones were hardwired too, and they were routed via an honest-to-god switchboard with quarter-inch plugs and jacks in the dorm office. A friend operated one as a student job.
Two years in they upgraded to modern (for the late 80s) room phones with modular jacks. The box for that was automated to allow direct dial in and out, much smaller, and in at least one dorm sat atop the old switchboard.
@16 in one of the later Oxford time travellers ones, Willis explains that mobile phones (and implicitly ubiquitous Internet and social media) are now both banned and taboo, hinting that the limited nuclear war that happens before the books was brought on by them. A character puts on a historic dress with a cellphone built in and is reassured that it has been safely deactivated.
@13: Angel is over 200 years old (I want to say 240ish), born in the 1700s. Drusilla and then Spike were from the 1800s.
IIRC he could use them at a basic level, but didn’t invest any brain power in fluency, and also had a tendency to forget, or possibly “forget”, his phone.
Another possibility for writing less advanced technology into a story is like “Pump Six” by Paolo Bacigalipi: society itself is falling into slow decline. Knowledge is being lost without anyone realizing it. Makes for quite a tension builder.
@36: Thanks for the correction.
16: Understandable that the phones’ real-world introduction after the series began appearing was problematic for the author, but was any explanation ever given?
But they didn’t; the first of Connie Willis’ time travel books, Domesday Book, came out in 1992, when mobile phones were very well established. Good Omens, to take one example, was published two years earlier, and mobile phones are mentioned frequently.
(For that matter Space Cadet involves mobile phones and was published in 1947.)
@30: The ‘Problem of the Week stops communicators working’ sounds like it ought to show up frequently. I’ve certainly seen it used in James H Schmitz’s “The Beacon to Elsewhere”.
@32: In “The Searcher” (again by Schmitz) the protagonists can’t call for help because they’re in a former military base that’s being used to store alien artefacts, and it has a heavy-duty force field that blocks physical access and unauthorised communications. A very sensible precaution if you’re designing a military base, but from the protagonists’ point of view it means they’re trapped inside the forcefield with an angry alien that’s come to look for its stolen property…
A potential partial solution for transporters would be to limit their range: If they only have a range of 500km, you aren’t going to be able to park your starship somewhere that can constantly reach the away team.
So you get to pick between having to wait for the ship to move or intermittent windows where you have a quick escape and generally longer waits otherwise. Will they be able to keep up the bluff holding the angry mob at bay for the 20 minutes it will take for the ship to get into range? Turn in next week for the exciting conclusion….
@39: huh, you’re right. Good Omens (1990) mentions car phones quite a bit, in expensive-sounding and new cars with “phone antennas” on their roofs. “Mobile phones” once or twice, “cellular phones” once.
I know that Europe in general was ahead of the US in cell phone adoption, between EU regulations and AIUI a lower quality (or higher price) of landline phone network to compete with, but 1990 still seems surprisingly early to me.
As an American, my impression was that cell phones only started becoming an ordinary person thing in the late 1990s, and still weren’t that pervasive; I got my own first cell phone in 2005. In first season “Buffy”, 1997, the rich girl Cordelia had a cell, but I think no one else did at first, even Buffy herself the ex-cool girl from LA. So you wouldn’t have had to explain why the cells weren’t used because quite likely no one had a phone, or if they did they could plausibly be out of charge or signal.
I believe Connie Willis is American, though one might expect time travelers to have access to the highest tech available. Still, they might not have impinged on her mental radar yet. I also note that cell phones take a lot of infrastructure to be usable, which might give a different reason for not being used in a time travel novel.
42: you’re right about adoption timing. In my experience mobile phones went from being rare to pervasive in the UK over the period mid-1998 to mid-1999, roughly when the Nokia 3110 and 3210 came out. The US lagged by several years because it refused to use the same GSM standard as the rest of the world.
In 1998 I had one friend who had a mobile phone and the rest of us thought this was a bit of a luxury and frankly rather odd. By the end of 1999 everyone I knew of my own age had a mobile phone.
In the late 80s and early 90s a mobile phone was an unusual thing to have in the UK – in part because they were very large and not terribly secure – but they were far from unknown. Crowley’s little act of evil is to tie up every mobile phone network in London for 45 minutes – in 1990, this would not have been a disaster or even noticeable for most people, but for the rich business types who actually had phones it would have been incredibly annoying, and they’d have taken it out on their secretaries and underlings when they got back to the office. They were known but not universal. (I remember an Inspector Morse episode from that time in which the twist is that the murderer made a phone call at a critical time which supposedly established his alibi at his office; but, Morse points out, he has a mobile phone, so he could have made that call from anywhere!)
I believe Connie Willis is American, though one might expect time travelers to have access to the highest tech available. Still, they might not have impinged on her mental radar yet.
Willis famously thought that 1940s Britain used a decimal currency. Her mental radar may have more than one bird’s nest in the dish antenna.
A potential partial solution for transporters would be to limit their range
As I recall, this was explicitly stated in the production notes written up by Gene Roddenberry et al. for Star Trek; the transporter couldn’t be used to simply beam personnel across vast distances, because that would make things far too easy, so the range was pretty much limited to planetary orbit (thus, for example, Scotty’s incredulity when Gary Seven tells him that he beamed directly to Earth from a planet many lightyears away). Later Star Trek franchises seem to have — um — played fast and loose with this limitation.
“The US lagged by several years because it refused to use the same GSM standard as the rest of the world. “
Around 1999 I read a WSJ article on cell phones. IIRC, it said Europe was around 18 months ahead of the US, and Japan 18 months ahead of Europe. I think it did mention the EU having mandated GSM as the tech, allowing for more competition (multiple potential carriers per phone) than the US’s Sprint/Verizon/GSM world. (But Japan didn’t go GSM either.) But it also said something about the quality and price of the corresponding land line networks. Either way, it said at the time that a European cell was like 2x the price of landline, but US cell was 7x.
Plus the whole limited minutes thing that was common then. (Especially with US pricing — you paid whether you called or had been called, ditto for sending and receiving texts.) Paying a lot of money to have like 500 minutes of talk time a month was not an obvious win.
That period in the early 2000s where the future, with regard to phones, was really unevenly distributed was odd to live through. Something like The Wire looked to UK viewers like a historical drama – policemen using typewriters and drug dealers using pagers and public phones. I actually thought it must be set in the early 90s until someone made a reference to 9/11.
A kind of reverse-problem occurred during the run of X-FILES, when it seemed as if Mulder and Scully could reach each other, and anybody else, by cellphone no matter where they were. Things still haven’t worked out that way (my town is still negotiating with homeowners on adding a cell tower to get rid of all the dead-spots in the town center).
Also an odd reverse case in Gotham; the show seems to be set in the early 80s (based on the cars, the fashion, and one scene of a character eating from a box of Frute Brute, which was discontinued in 1982), yet everyone has a flip-phone, apparently because the writers couldn’t imagine telling a police procedural without them.
In The X-Files episode ‘Unusual Suspects’ (series 5, episode 3), which is set in 1989, Mulder meets the Lone Gunmen for the first time at a trade show in Baltimore. At one point, he pulls his mobile phone out of his trenchcoat, and it’s one of these monsters:-
This, of course, is hilarious.