Monday 13 May 2013

Another Mattercaster

I am checking out conceptually related stories to see whether they form a series but, in this case, they don't. Like Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars and its sequel, "The Ways of Love," "Elementary Mistake" in Anderson's Space Folk (New York, 1989), has the idea of spaceship crews crossing interstellar distances at relativistic speeds but then constructing mattercasters so that instantaneous teleportation between the Solar System and each new extra-solar colony becomes possible.

The problem in this story is that a new planet defies expectations by lacking the necessary construction materials in sufficient quantities so that the crew seem to be stranded and, not having read to the end of the story yet, I do not know how the problem is going to be either explained or resolved.

However, enough information has been given so far to place this story in a fictitious future different from that of The Enemy Stars. Apart from the facts that the home regime is a World Federation, not a Protectorate, and that the null-null drive, like the zero-zero drive in Starfarers, does not have to accelerate to get to just under light speed:

"...the [mattercaster] does have to have a strong gravitational field to work. Got to be on a planet." (p. 116)

The mattercasters in The Enemy Stars are in the slowly accelerating ships so that fuel can be teleported to them and successive generations of astronauts can spend short periods in the ships before returning instantaneously to the Solar System. As I have said before, Anderson seems to develop every possible application of an idea.

After a couple of digressions, I must get back to rereading The Enemy Stars.

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