Random thought of the moment: Wouldn't so many aspects of life just be so much easier if we had the capacity to teleport ourselves?
Corollary: Erm, I had one in mind. Honest. But now I've forgotten it. Oh well, must have been something about life being annoyingly complex, so much so that I forgot it!
Larry Niven wrote a story about safe, reliable, and crime-encouraging teleportation. When I read it, the title was _The Permanent Floating Riot Club_, I think. (Sometimes his work has been re-released under different titles.)
Re:Well...
krellis on 2002-01-24T20:28:45
Good point. We'd need security fields, then, I guess. And special rotating codes to let you teleport through them. In fact, maybe it's easier that we don't have teleportation. I'll just have to invent it and keep it to myself!
:) Re:Well...
jmm on 2002-01-24T22:40:37
In the case of Niven's world (there were a number of stories based in the same environment), you couldn't teleport to an arbitrary location. It required a teleport booth at both ends. You enter a booth, pay your fee, and enter the code number for the destination booth. Preventing people from coming into your home meant keeping the booth outside the locked door. The "floating riot club" was separate - they took advantage of what happens when the Slashdot effect is caused by physical people instead of IP packets. Any interesting news item on a popular TV show lead to a huge instantaneous influx of people, far more than the location could handle. In the resulting crowd, the riot club would start looting.Re:Well...
chaoticset on 2002-01-25T13:42:04
I brought it up as an example of teleportation tech that caused problems. I realize that it wasn't what was described.You're referring to the Known Space universe, right? I almost think he had booths in other, similar universes (he played with some Known Space elements before he actually created the consistent Known Space series.)
Re:Well...
jmm on 2002-01-25T16:43:13
I think it was all the Known Space universe for transport booths. That universe covers a long period of time, the transport booths come in fairly early - long before contact with other species, very long before Ringworld. The transport booths were still present those many centuries later in Ringworld - that starts off with Louis Wu celebrating all 49 hours of his birthday by transporting through timezones (but his trip got got short because the puppeteer hacked the transport protocol and redirected his packets, er, body).
A number of the transport booth stories were short stories, in collection books like Tales of Known Space, and Neutron Start, and there was an earlier one that's long out of print that has a number of stories in common with Tales of Known Space (I forget the title - I'm not at home this week but in Boston so I can't look in my library).
