I’m currently reading Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky. It’s a multi-universe story. In other words, a parallel worlds story. The main character, Titus Quinn, travels to another universe, one in which he accidentally visited years before and where his wife and child are presumed lost. Travel between universes brings up a huge problem in my head. The same problem comes up in any time travel story. It comes up in any travel between universes story. It comes up in any story which uses a gate
that transports people instantly.
That problem is where you arrive. A few stories touch on it. One doesn’t want to materialize in the middle of solid rock, for instance. When stories deal with that problem, they very rarely deal with air. As if suddenly being merged with a volume of atmosphere isn’t also a problem. There are viable solutions though. Both sides get a volume of matter transferred to the other side. A swap, if you will.
But a deeper problem exists, as I see it. A problem that is dealt with even more rarely. Each side of a transfer has it’s own motion. As I stand on the Earth right now, I am being flung at great speed in a circle around the center of the Earth. Earth (and me) is being flung around the sun at great speed. And the solar system and galaxy traveling at great speeds as well. That’s a lot of motion. If I step through some sort of portal, what happens to all that inertia? If we conserve mass and energy, it can’t just disappear. Of course, we can conveniently decide as a creator of a fictional world that we don’t need this law of thermodynamics. But let’s assume we don’t do that. It has to go somewhere. I vaguely remember one story I read that dealt with the problem, but I can’t remember which story.
But I think an even deeper problem exists, and it’s one that I think about every time I read one of these stories. How are the transfer points determined or fixed? Every time I read Julian May’s Saga of the Pliocene Exile series, I wondered. What are the end-points of the time-gate/tunnel hooked to? Are they hooked to matter, or space? In Stargate, these things are hooked to matter, immense gate devices. But if it’s hooked to a spot in space, aren’t we traveling away from that spot at immense speeds? How is it that the tunnel end-point in May’s books follows the rotation of the Earth, with Earth around the Sun, etc.? Shouldn’t the other side be somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse by now?
If it is fixed to matter, how is that possible? As a warp in space-time, matter that touches the anomaly becomes transported to the other side. How can it hold on to matter that is suddenly on the other side?
These aren’t unanswerable questions. If science fiction can posit them, it can answer how they work. I just tend to wonder why a genre which is frequently anal-retentive and meticulous about how other things work just waves away this particular problem most of the time. I’ve missed the books and stories that do attempt to work through the problem. So, I ask my three loyal readers, which ones make such attempts?
Photo The stargate into the party taken by Flickr user gillicious, used under a Creative Commons By-Nc-Sa license.
2 Comments
In Octavia Butler’s book Kindred which uses instantaneous transfer through time as more of a plot device (the why/how is never really explained), the character gets transferred with a wall in the middle of her arm. Oops, no more arm.
I guess if you’re transferred somewhere on earth, earth’s momentum is constant…
If you did it so that the time of day and the point in the rotation around the sun is the same time-wise and account for galactic drift, I suppose it’s constant.
In Kindred, what happens to the air where the person appeared?