Teemings
The E-Zine of the Straight Dope Community

Teleportation Angst

by Cal Meacham

In his book Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats, engineer/author Samuel C. Florman writes about visiting the Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant in Haddam, Connecticut. His guide, Tony, takes him to the storage pool holding the spent fuel rods. Florman, in case you have not read this book, or his more famous one, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, is a pro-technology engineer who takes pride in his work, defending science and engineering from what he sees as the knee-jerk reactions of antitechnologists. He does so with considerable knowledge and flair. So how does he react to this storage pool? …

”Hold on to your hat,” said Tony as I peered over the edge. This was not so easily done, since I found that I had a fierce grip on my pad and pencil and, particularly, the railing. I stared down into the depths and saw the pale blue glow of --- what? The promise of a new Arcadia? The flaming eyes of Baal? In truth, I was not thinking in a poetic mode; I felt like getting out of the place.

I have visited factories and stood beside huge machines and roaring furnaces, usually with a feeling of exhilaration. Staring into the storage pool was a different sort of experience. I came away with a sense of the irrational dread - the angst -- that underlies the widespread hostility to nuclear power. During the next few days, I told a number of people, including several engineers, that I had been inside a nuclear power plant. Almost without exception the news was received with a gesture or a remark that meant, “How exciting, but don’t get too close to me.”

This I how people - even trained people - react to a technology that is serious, possibly dangerous, and still new and unfamiliar to most. What is a bit surprising is that people seem to react to a non-existent technology in much the same way. Technology angst for a non-existent technology. I’m referring to teleportation.

By “teleportation” I refer to the transmission of matter across space without any passage of the complete object through the intervening space. It’s an old idea in science fiction, and in the classic image one steps into a “teleportation booth” at one location, undergoes some sort of technological magic in between, then emerges from another booth elsewhere. The magic is usually along the lines of breaking the person or object down into its constituent parts, recording the position and state of each atom, then re-creating that state at the other end. SF fans balk at the notion that the travel is accomplished through travel through higher dimensions. The generally authoritative Science Fiction Encyclopedia takes issue with the terminology, holding that “teleportation” ought to be reserved for cases where this mystical travel is accomplished without use of technology, as a psychic power, and that “matter transmission” be used for equipment-assisted travel. But in my experience, “teleportation” is a broadly-used term, covering any sort of matter transmission and that’s how I’ll use it here.

You could argue, James Burke-fashion, that the idea of teleportation started with the idea of communication over distances. Certainly people have been trying to communicate over distances ever since there were people with language - yelling, signalling with smoke or heliograph, signals from horns and “talking drums” all carried information, but it was limited. The transmission of more detailed messages by a regular system is relatively new - only a couple of hundred years old. Naval signal flags and semaphore worked for the military. Mechanical telegraphs started carrying civilian messages about two hundred years ago. There were several different kinds - towers with adjustable arms, rows of geometrical shapes, billboard-like arrays of movable panels. In all cases there existed unique positions for letters or commonly-used words. The towers were placed as far apart as sight (through a telescope) allowed, and chains of such structures could rapidly carry a message through the countryside.

Next, these contraptions were replaced by the electric telegraphs. Samuel Morse’s method was the most successful, but there were a number of competing systems. And then, of course, there was the telephone in 1876. Finally, people could simply speak to one another over distance. It was the miracle of the age.

But a seven-days’ wonder is accepted as commonplace on the eighth day, as Robert Heinlein noted. Once you accept the idea of instantaneous long-range communication, your attention becomes focused on its deficiencies. It’s not good enough that you can communicate at all, now it bothers you when the communication is not perfect.

You can get a sense of this from Mark Twain, among others. He had a telephone set up in a special booth in his house in Hartford, Connecticut, back when very few people had telephones. He evidently took great joy and pride in being one of the few telephone subscribers, but what shows up in his writing are the limitations of the invention, as much as the triumphs. He wrote one piece about the problems of trying to interpret a telephone conversation, when you only hear one side of it. In his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)(how the boy from Hannibal, Missouri must have loved calling his proxy self a “Yankee”!) his hero Hank Morgan is able to call for help using a telephone he has “invented” and put in place, but at another point the problems of the telephone almost overturn his plans. The knights he summoned from Camelot to The Valley of Holiness almost don’t arrive.:

“…We learn naught but that we get by the telephone from Camelot.”

“Why, they know all about this thing. Haven’t they told you anything about the great miracle of the restoration of a holy fountain?”

“Oh, that? Indeed yes. But the name of this valley doth woundily differ from the name of that one; indeed to differ wider were not pos---“

“What was that name, then?”

“The Valley of Hellishness.”

“That explain it. Confound a telephone, anyway. It is the very demon for conveying similarities of sound that are miracles of divergence from similarity of sense….”

It’s easy for us to be unaware of the fidelity (or lack thereof) of the early telephones, with their carbon-granule resistor microphones and entirely analogue nature, but the fact that Twain can base a plot point on the ease of confusing “Holiness” with “Hellishness” as heard over the telephone reminds us.

Another thing easy to forget is that the equivalent of “Fax” transmission was around in those early days as well, sending pictures over the telephone lines.

Once you have the idea of a telephone, communicating voice over distance, it’s easy to see how an imaginative individual can extrapolate sending other information over distance, as well. Jules Verne came up with the “telephote” -a television system, which he used in Carpathian Castle ( Le Château des Carpathes, written in 1892), the first mock-gothic epic in which, as in Twain’s book, the “magic” is all done by scientific tricks. He also used it in Yesterday and Tomorrow (Hier et demain, 1910, although the short story in this collection was written much earlier).

An even more daring extrapolation was made by Edward Page Mitchell, an underappreciated author who seems to have written the first story involving a time-travel machine and the first modern invisibility story, both well before Wells. In 1877 he wrote “The Man Without a Body”, which seems to be the first story by anyone about teleportation. A man successfully transmits a cat by wire, as if it were a telephone message or a facsimile. He then transmits himself, but the battery fails partway through, and only his head is transmitted.

There it is - the very first story about teleportation, and it’s not about what you can do with this, or how wonderful it would be, or how this would change society. No, the first story about teleportation focuses on how awful it can be if something goes wrong.

I want to emphasize this again, because it's alien to the optimism inherent in the body of literature we call “science fiction”. A lot of early sf has been criticized as juvenile and trivial, mere wish-fulfillent. And a lot of it was, but it celebrated the capabilities of technology, and made a hero of the Engineer and the Man of Science. The more cynical and wary strand in the sf tradition, in which science is seen as a two-edged sword, came after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the rise of the Cold War. “There Are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know” is the hoary cliché of the 1950s. It was not the spirit in the 1880’s.

To see what I mean, imagine if Jules Verne had written his novel From the Earth to the Moon and had the space capsule melt due to atmospheric friction, killing the inhabitants. Or, in the sequel, having the space travelers being stranded in space, because their on-board rockets did not fire. Early science fiction is characterized by space ships that work the first time, weird powers and devices that extend man’s reach. Even as pessimistic a writer as H.G. Wells had happy or at least neutral endings to most of his stories. In The Time Machine, the unnamed hero doesn’t cause irreparable harm to the course of time, or get killed himself. But in The Man Without a Body the entire point of the story is How Awful Things Can Be When Technology Goes Wrong.

Okay, so the first teleportation story is pessimistic, dwelling on the horrible consequences of machine error. Certainly that’s just fluke, right? No. The very next story about teleportation, Robert Duncan Milne’s “Professor Vehr’s Electrical Experiment” (1885) has exactly the same thing happen. It’s as if the very first two stories about interplanetary travel were to be about the ships crashing.

Teleportation showed up occasionally after that, but it got its big boost with the rise of the pulp magazines, and from the 1930s onward they became a science fiction staple. Teleportation devices were used for interplanetary travel and for transporting goods to market. But nobody remembers these stories. The first one that really sticks in people’s minds wasn’t published in a science fiction magazine at all, but in Playboy in 1957. George Langelaan’s story about a scientist whose teleportation device goes awry is more fantasy than science fiction. And, again, the whole point of the story is the awfulness that can ensue when Things Go Wrong. The point was driven home when the story was adapted as a movie the next year (with a screenplay by “Shogun” author James Clavell). It was a commercial success, and gave rise to two sequels, Return of the Fly in 1959 and The Curse of the Fly in 1965. Both of these sequels were in black and white, unlike the lavish color original.

In Langelaan’s original story, inventor Delambre first tries out his invention on his cat, which does not re-appear in the teleportation booth, apparently disappearing into the ether. Later, having (he thought) corrected the problem, he uses the teleportation booth himself, but something goes horribly wrong. The story is told through the point of view of his wife, who communicates with her husband through notes. He keeps himself covered up and asks her to try to locate a white-headed fly. When he gets hungry, he asks for a bowl of milk laced with spirits.

Ultimately, it’s revealed that when Delambre tried to teleport himself a fly was in the chamber at the time, and he and the fly exchanged heads. Actually, there’s more - as his wife learns, the transformed Delambre also has parts of that kitten from the earlier failed teleportation. You certainly wouldn’t want to use the Delambre Teleporter - you could end up with God-knows-what from previous transits!

In the movie, of course, there was no kitten addition to the mix, and Al (David) Hedison ends up not only with the head of the fly, but also one hand and one foot. As science fiction, the story is ludicrous - even if the information got scrambled, why would the fly parts be sized to fit Delambre’s body (and vice-versa, as we learn at the end of both story and film)? The internal plumbing wouldn’t line up, in any case, and both the man-with-the-fly-head and the fly-with-the-man-head both seem to have Delambre’s brain (“Help me! Help Meeeeeee!” screams the fly caught in the spider web at the end.)

As horror, though, it works well. The creations are shocking without being silly, and it ties up our fear of technology gone awry in one neat bundle. Film has always been more shocking and had a greater impact than the written word. The image of Delambre with the Fly Head (and the reverse shot of his wife seen in multiple fly-eye images) has become one of the Movie Icons. The image passes one of my tests for cultural currency - it is used by Gary Larsen and other cartoonists in making single-panel gags. This film has also been spoofed on The Simpsons and Jimmy Neutron.

It is, as far as I am aware, the first appearance of the idea of teleportation in general mass media. And, again, as in the case of Mitchell’s seminal short story, it set the tone for future treatments and for public reception of the idea - Teleportation is Bad and Dangerous. Again, compare this to the first appearance of any other new science fiction idea in the movies. Space Travel was not treated as an inherently dangerous activity in its first motion picture appearances.

And, again as with the literary teleporters, it wasn’t just the first case where things went awry. Both sequels to The Fly featured Awful Things happening every time someone uses the device - a man and a guinea pig trade extremities, a man is reduced to jell-o, Delambre’s son and a fly exchange heads (the special effects for this being particularly awful) - although in this case, the effect is reversed by another passage through the teleporter.

The trend continued through the years. The Projected Man (1967) was a British treatment of the teleporter, with similarly terrible outcome. The Fly was remade by director David Cronenburg in 1986, with a vastly different story, using a screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue. This time, the “telepod” (as they call it, a name that has stuck) acts as a sort of gene-splicer, and inventor Seth Brundle ends up not with fly parts, but with fly instructions in his genetic code that causes him to slowly become a new creature. It’s not as immediately ludicrous an idea as the original (although still impossible to justify scientifically), and the story can be read as an allegory of aging, or being different. But, again, the whole point is that Telepods are Bad. You wouldn’t want to use the Brundle Telepod, even in a fly-free area. You’d gene-splice with the bacteria in your stomach, or the parasites living in your eyelashes. Yeccch.

Like its movie predecessor, this film sparked a sequel, The Fly II, directed by the special effects man from the first one, Chris Walas. And, again, something awful happens with the telepod. In fact, it’s a lot like the sequel to the original Fly movie, because the son of the inventor ends up getting mixed up with a fly again - what are the odds? (I swear, if I ever invent a teleporter, the first thing I do is going to be travelling with a fly, just to show people.)

Okay, you say, but this is just Fear of Technology by people who don’t understand science, or care about the source material. Science fiction buffs wouldn’t be afraid like that, right?

Wrong. Gene Roddenbery, whatever else you may say, certainly knew and loved pulp science fiction. His television show Star Trek has had a major and lasting impact on public knowledge of SF, and was embraced by the fans. It popularized the notion that you could teleport without a receiving booth, which was a bit of an innovation when it first appeared. Roddenbery admitted that it was basically a cheap way of getting the crew down to the planet’s surface each week. The “transporter”, as the called it, was a staple of the show, Finally, teleportation would be seen as just another tool, and we could see it being employed as any other element of science fiction.

Only it didn’t. The damned thing seemed to constantly be breaking down and screwing things up. Someone gets transported up with some strange dust on him, and the transported Kirk gets split into Good and Bad halves. People get stuck in mid-transit. The Transporter breaks down and can’t be used. In the very first Star Trek movie the transporter breaks down and gooshes two crew members (“What came back didn’t live long, fortunately”). In the later series, this continued, with the Transporter combining people, or with people being stranded mid-teleport and attacking future transportees. Even in the satire of Star Trek done by Mad Magazine, Captain Kirk comes out of the “descanner” with his head attached directly to his waist, a hand coming out of one ear. In the second Star Trek novel, “Spock Must Die” by noted sf author James Blish, Mr. Spock gets split into two halves by a malfunctioning transporter.

And it’s still going on. I just finished reading Michael Crichton’s novel “Timeline”, which is essentially about a teleporter used as a time machine. Only people and things don’t come out unscathed - “transcription errors” cause them to come out with mismatches between parts. There’s a graphic scene with a “split” cat. (Why don’t writers of failed trasporters leave cats alone, already?)

I go on at length abiout this because it seems clear that the most public and wide-spread images of teleporters are all a one-note show: “This is Bad Technology. It’s Dangerous! Don’t do it or Terrible Things Will Happen!” And this is strange to me. Even Invisibility, which has often enough been a similar one-note show (“Invisible People can’t be seen, so they aren’t accountable. They think they’re free of moral laws and will do anything!”) has branched out - I can think of at least three television series about benign invisible men, and several movies in which the invisible man doesn’t become a power-mad murderer.

And while it’s true that teleportation is often used as a benign thing (A lot of the time in Star Trek, or in the Stargate movie and series), it’s “invisible” in that it’s merely a time-saving plot device. These stories aren’t about teleportation and its ramifications. They’re just a way to get the story started and moving efficiently.

In contrast, science fiction literature has plenty of examples of stories that are truly about teleportation and its effects on society. Alfred Bester’s The Stars my Destination examines the implications of a society in which many (but not all) people can teleport themselves by mental effort. How does this change society? Houses have to be specially constructed to discourage teleporting criminals, who could otherwise enter your house without effort. Criminals also teleport around the world, staying under cover of night. Messenger services are established for instantaneous transport. Transportation services are hit hard, and trains become collector’s items for the idle rich.

Larry Niven wrote a wonderful essay on the topic, “The Theory and Practice of Teleportation” and later wrote a series of stories about how cheap and easy teleportation booths change society, starting with “Flash Crowd” in 1973. Niven also had cheap teleportation units used as a sort of piecewise mass-transit system on the world inhabited by a space-faring race he invented, the Pierson’s Puppeteers. By having them use it, Niven, a confirmed pro-technology writer, affirmed his belief in its safety - his Puppeteers are, by human standards, pathologically cowardly and cautious. If they use them, teleportation must be safe.

John Brunner (who, with Niven and Jack Vance, had written teleportation stories for Robert Silverberg’s 1973 anthology Three Trips in Time and Space) explored the social effects of teleportation in a couple of novels, The Web of Everywhere and The Infinitive of Go.

Matter transmitters are used as aids in exploration in Poul Anderson’s The Enemy Stars and Algis Budrys’ “Rogue Moon”. Countless stories use them as colonization gates, as in Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky.

Probably the most extravagant use of teleportation is as always-open portal between rooms in a single structure, whose rooms or doors are on different planets. The idea seems first to have been used in the Bob Shaw story “Aspect” in 1954. Roger Zelazny used the idea in his 1973 book Today We Choose Faces, but most readers are probably familiar with the concept from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series. The idea seems ludicrously expensive (which, in Simmons’ case, is partly the point) and incredibly complex (“Shut the door. There’s a draft from Pluto.”) I note, in the spirit of this essay, that in the Simmons novels Something Awful happens with teleportation. But at least it doesn’t involve cats or flies. In most Science Fiction stories and novels, however, this prospect of dire consequences does not dominate the story or action. Based on the track record of sheer numbers of appearances in science fiction stories and novels, I’d bet that teleportation is statistically safer than automobile travel, especially calculated in passenger-miles. But you don’t see people writing stories about the Sheer Horror an Awful Consequences of travel by cars.

Bibliographic note: Besides the sources cited above, I have heavily used the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, both the original 1979 edition and the revised edition, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction from 1995. There are significant additions to and omissions from the second edition.