No – teleportation and matter transmission has long been a staple of science fiction. Star Trek notably used existing science fiction tropes. I can’t think of any the show itself invented. George Langelaan (author of The Fly)wasn’t by any means the first to use it, either – and his use of it was pretty unscientific. His hero gets mixed up with not only a fly, but also a kitten that he’d tried to teleport. Why not his own gut bacteria? or microparasites living on his skin? He was simply writing a horror story with science fiction trappings.
George O. Smith had teleportation in his Venus Equilateral stories – and handled it from an engineer’s viewpoint (although I find the idea of an “analog teleporter” pretty disturbing. I want my teleportation technology to be digital). Have a look at the stories referenced here (already cited, I’m told, but a good reference)
The idea was heavily used in comic books well before Star Trek. The “Zeta Beam” that brought Adam Strange to the alien world of Rann was a standard of the series (whivh was written by SF author Gardner Fox). Marvel comics used various teleportation devices, too.
What has long bothered me is that there is a fear of something going wrong with the teleporter. I wrote an article about this entitled “Teleportation Angst” for our now long-departed ezine Teemings. My point was that people have this irrational fear of teleporters going bad just as they would use them – even though the technology doesn’t even exist. It’s right there in one of the very first stories about teleportation (Edward Page Mitchell’s The Man Without a Body"). It’s in another of the very first stories, too. And it;s in The Fly and its cinematic interpretations. And it seems to show up frequently in Star Trek – which depends upon the technology.
People don’t have the same irrational fear for other science fictiony technology – rockets, for instance, even though there’s good reason to be afraid of rockets going wrong. They don’t have the same fear of antigravity devices, even though they’re potentially just as dangerous. Imagine if the first few stories about rocket travel concentrated not on the travel, but on the likelihood of the rockets exploding on the launch pad , and on the consequences, and on nothing else.
Although teleportation angst seems to afflict the general populace, it’s a lot less common in SF literature. Larry Niven and Poul Anderson and Arthur C. Clarke simply assumed the technology would work fine.
Or, maybe people are just trying to write interesting stories. Teleporters fail in interesting ways–disappearance, duplication, various forms of body horror, problems with personal identity, and so on. What does an antigravity failure look like? Falling to the ground and dying, most likely. Very mundane in comparison. Same deal with rockets exploding. We see stuff exploding all the time, and know how it works. Not very science fictiony.
The Expanse had an exception, where the inventor of their super-engine was trapped in a rocket where it got stuck on. And then kept accelerating at ever-increasing rates. That was a much more interesting outcome than if it had just exploded.
Sure, teleporters can fail in interesting ways… but they can be even more interesting when they don’t fail. Or at least, when the teleportation technology itself doesn’t fail. What happens to society as a result of successful, safe teleportation? Suburbs of New York built in New Mexico? Flash mobs, coalescing from all over the globe? Locked-room assassinations? Every smoldering war reignited at once, once the enemies can easily reach each other? That’s where the really good science fiction writers step in.
Teleportation tech gets at the definition of self and consciousness in a way that SF tech usually doesn’t. It’s more obvious what can go wrong when your atoms are scanned and reconstructed—the reconstruction goes wrong, and in a way that would be body-horror inducing, rather than, say, an explosion.
And that’s without getting into the idea that the transported copy may not be you and yet no one can tell.
Sure, those stories are interesting too. And they certainly exist. Star Trek doesn’t really do them–in the 99% of stories where the transporter tech is working, there seems to be little exploration of the consequences beyond convenience. But CalMeacham wondered why teleporters specifically seemed to attract more attention when it comes to the technology failing than some other fictional technologies. I don’t think it’s even necessarily an outlier anyway; time travel, AI, cloaking/invisibility, warp drives, and so also fail on a regular basis (as well as show up in consequence-driven stories).
Jack Wodhams’ There Is a Crooked Man from 1967 has a subplot about teenagers deliberately misusing teleporters to get “merged” (judging from the fact that this was reversed surgically, the merging was fairly high level) - so the idea of transporters and the problems they could cause were common parlance at the time (Wodhsms lived in Australia- this story could easily have been written before Star Trek premiered - and almost certainly before Wodhams could have seen it)
Back in the '60s I had a Disney comic in which the “second story” was one where Merlin Jones (the “Teen Wizard”) invented a teleporter that looked exactly like a Polaroid-type camera. All you had to do was snap a picture of something and it was instantly teleported wherever you wanted.
Of course, a gang of criminals managed to steal the device and used it to rob jewelry stores and the like, demonstrating how inventions can be used for both good and evil. In other words, “Teleporters don’t commit crimes, people do.”
No – there’s something special and different about teleportation devices failing. In other cases a story might be initiated by failure of some device, and then the rest of the story proceeds. But in the case of the teleportation device failing, THAT’S the whole story. It’s not a case of "Gee, the teleporter failed and now we have to somehow find our way back from 1500 miles away. It’s – “The teleporter failed and now my foot is sticking out of my ear.” End of story.
By the way – how many stories are you aware of where the Time Machine broke down? I don’t know of any. myself*, which is why I wrote The Traveler.
You can’t even count the Back to the Future series, really – the DeLorean never actually broke down. They just lacked the plutonium to power it.
@CalMeacham I was going to ask you about my idea in the post above, but I realized that I didn’t reply to you. I’m remedying that mistake now.
I think that the way teleportation tends to work in SF taps into some primal fears that other inventions don’t. They way reconstructing your atoms can go wrong is more horrific than, say, merely dying in explosion. (More details above).
A test would be to see if the same fears show up in teleportation that doesn’t use this idea, like just a magical spell that changes your location. Is there more talk about such a spell going wrong rather than any other spell?
Well, they’re very personal, by their very nature. A whole spaceship crew may be taken out if its engines fail. A time machine failure may affect the entire universe. But a transporter accident usually only affects the person/people in question.
That feels like a distinction without a difference. And in any case, applies to transporter accidents just as well. The very first example above, THE MAN WITHOUT A BODY, happened because the man “had forgotten to replenish the cups of [his] battery with fresh sulphuric acid”. The second example in your link, Professor Vehr’s Electrical Experiment, failed due to the power cutting out (or surging) just as the return trip was progressing (A transformer explosion? It’s not clear, but it was an external failure of some kind.)
Quantum Leap sure is an example of a time machine not working properly. I’m sure there have been many where, due to device or operator error, the people went farther into the future or past than expected.
Of course, many time travel stories don’t have a time machine as such, but where time travel happens due to a failure of time kind. Tau Zero, for example, has our characters rapidly progressing through time–even looping through to a new universe–due to an engine failure on their ship. Or, The Philadelphia Experiment, where a malfunctioning stealth generator causes the ship to go back in time.
Hmm. That’s exactly how it worked in our last D&D game, though admittedly, that was a spell. The anxiety in using the ability was actually due to (possibly) being displaced far away, and not so much about issues of identity or the like.
Also, in many teleportation stories, the device works exactly as designed–just with horrifying consequences. The most common (perhaps) being that the machine is a copier plus suicide box. Or, in Stephen King’s The Jaunt we have “It’s longer than you think!”
I’d dispute this, as well. They blew up the intake manifold in BTTF3, making the gas engine useless. They might have made the alcohol fuel work, but were careless due to being in a rush. Since exceeding 88 mph was a crucial part of time travel, and the time circuits specifically built within a car to achieve this, I’d definitely say they broke the time machine.
Larry Niven dealt with the problems of teleportation and how conservation laws were affected in a series of early stories, as well as the wonderful essay Theory and Practice of Teleportation (which is in his collection All the Myriad Ways). His idea of “flash mobs” came a little later.
He addressed it, but not very well. Like, when considering where the energy comes from when teleporting uphill, he never considered the answer “you have to put more energy into the teleporter to make that happen”.
That was one of the examples I had in mind (I liked it too). But there are others, such as Think Like a Dinosaur (a short story and Outer Limits episode).
Oh, and the simple answer to “are you still the same person after using a transporter” is “of course not”. Because you’re also not the same person after not using a transporter. The “me” of five minutes ago is very similar to, but not precisely the same as, the “me” of right this moment, nor the “me” of five minutes hence. If you can tell me in what sense you remain “the same person” from moment to moment, then I’ll tell you whether you’re “the same person” after using a transporter.
Yeah, I’m in the suicide booth camp, myself. I think what swayed me was reading The Cuckoo Chronicles by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson at a young age. Their transporter doesn’t destroy the original. “Brave” volunteers would send their duplicates to the far and hostile ends of the galaxy and the duplicate’s first words would always be “Son of a bitch…”.
