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I know that in the Starforce Trilogy, and in Spinrad's "Void Captain's Tale," space travel depends on gender-specific teleportation abilities. Usually female-only.
I wonder what people think of using the idea in stories.
I was planning to use the idea, with modifications, in some space opera stories, because it dodges the physical objections to faster-than-light travel, and it complicates the gender politics of the societies involved. I figure it could involve a drug and/or cybernetic implants that help people do this, but make some people too dysphoric to do this.
I'm not ready to write those stories, so I was wondering about using the same basic idea, in another setting, with people going between parallel universes, and robots, and wish-fulfillment, instead of across interstellar space.
So wha do people think of the idea, and when to use it or not use it.
Comments
While not teleportation
The movie The Ambushers, a loose parody of James Bond loosely based upon a couple of Matt Helm novels by Donald Hamilton, has a flying saucer that "due to the electo-magnetic power of the saucer, only a woman is able to fly it, males of the species are killed by the energy." The movie is HORRIBLE, with a capital HORRIBLE. The premise is nonsensical, the special effects aren't (special), the acting embarrasses ham, the science is silly, and the movie is sexist and racist.
Other than those things...
...tell us howmuch you liked the movie. :)
LOL.
The books are pretty good, dark and gritty, spy noir as opposed to James Bond that is more spy opera.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
The Matt Helm books
I think I have all the paperbacks. I loved the books but the movies - Dean Martin? Jerry Lewis could have done it better!.
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So over all, i'm guessing
So over all, i'm guessing here, after all the faults you would give it a ZERO out of 10 points? Please feel free to tell us what you really think of the movie, because I loved your analysis of it. ;-)
I think 1/2 out of 10
There is at least one part that makes some sort of sense. The female agent, after trying to recover the "flying saucer" is on a rail flat car rolling down a grade. She actually tries to stop the railcar by using the manual brake, it doesn't work, but she actually tried to save herself.
Think of "The Ambushers"
As high camp. I got a good laugh out of it when I saw it. It skewers everything it touches, including the main girl character being the usual armcandy Bond girl. Where others might see it as misogynistic, think of the norms at the time and how they are treated in the movie. If you take anything in the Matt Helm movies seriously you are totally missing the point.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
In SF
I'm against the notion of gender-based teleportation in SF, as opposed to fantasy. Actually, I don't care for teleportation or Star-Trek-type transporters in general. They don't really dodge the objections to FTL travel. I can think of FTL travel as a future discovery based on fundamental physics being different from our current understanding. I suppose teleportation and time-travel can be thought of as future-discovery as well.
Basing teleportation on gender is akin to basing the ability of a car to drive based on its paint color, or perhaps whether it has a built-in DVD player for back-seat passengers. Gender represents somewhat different designs of the human body. All gender-based differences in natural ability are come from natural selection, based on the fact that a woman has to carry a baby for nine months to reproduce.
Teleportation has its own fridge horror: it's essentially obliterating a person and creating a clone with the person's memories. If I'm the person obliterated, the clone isn't me. I'm dead.
-- Daphne Xu
Well, it makes as much sense
Well, it makes as much sense as most ftl ideas, and if it involves drugs, and if they interact with people's limbic and/or endocrine systems, then why wouldn't it be gender-restricted?
And I wasn't thinking of a disassembly/reassembly system like in Trek, but I don't understand the argument. If I don't exist any more, then I'm dead. If I'm distorted into someone else, maybe I'm dead. If I still exist after it, then I'm still alive. P.S. Some Jewish and Christian views interpret resurrection as reassembly, so the same argument could be made that the resurrected self isn't the original, although divine reassembly wouldn't involve the same risks of mishaps as technological reassembly might.
I'm With Daphne...
...on the last point. If I'm obliterated at one end of a transporter beam. the fact that someone just like me turns up at the other end doesn't do my own consciousness any good. The individual created at the other end will consider himself an extension of my life, but he's only a copy, however perfect that copy may be. -I- died in transmission.
Eric
DK if it's relevant to the overall discussion, but back in the 50s, William Tenn posited a military radiation-based weapon with a recoil that would sterilize any male that fired it. (No word on whether women were safe; that wasn't the focus of the story.)
I also agree with Daphne...
...on the transporter bit. I did not like when the "Stargate" series added the same basic explanation as the "Star Trek Transporters". The original movie did not explain "The Gates", however "The Rings" appeared to work suspiciously like "Trek" type "Transporters". I much Prefer the old "Heinlein" type "Doorways", that folded space to let a person step directly from one place to another. Let's hope that if they ever develop something that it is something more like Heinlein's folded space "Doorways".
Does anyone remember a short story involving, "teleport transporters" of some sort becoming common transportation, and Humanity stagnated as creativity etc was lost since the "Transporties" no longer had a "Soul".
~Hypatia >i< ..:::
PS. I also remember a different story where "virtual immortality" caused almost the same thing, no looming death meant no creative spark.
Funny
I must have glossed over the PS when I first read this comment, because three and a half years ago, I didn't connect it with series of stories I read long ago.
The story I read was the middle of three, where humanity was being tested by an alien civilization, to see whether it deserved being contacted yet. The middle story was one of the tests, its test on the temptation of immortality. For example, one top-notch composer had been given the immortality treatment. He bragged to the protagonist how he was now finally able to compose a symphony that really said something. He'd been at work half a century on that symphony.
Another encounter by the protagonist was with one designing a rocket to launch humanity off the earth. He kept tinkering with the design, and had less of one than some decades earlier.
There was also this televangelist politician, who was campaigning against the immortality treatment, as violating God's will, etc.
-- Daphne Xu
Transporters
If you want 100% accuracy then you'd best quit reading Sci-Fi. Pretty much every S-F tale has an element of handwavium in it. Two key items in Star Trek, the transporter and warp drive, were used to keep the plot moving. Warp Drive was used to keep the galactic travel going fast enough to make it seem reasonable to be at point A and "suddenly" at point B investigating some new incident.
The transporter was the same, a way to get around the tedious jump into a shuttle, fly down to the surface, then have to reverse the steps to get back to the Enterprise. The side effect of that was having to figure out why Capt. Kirk couldn't just be beamed up out of whatever trouble he was in. That's why the transporter was always breaking down. I think Scotty never put enough handwavium into the transporter circuits.
I remember one sci-fi novel where if you were required to be somewhere in space you stepped into a booth, you were scanned, the data was sent out to where you were needed while the original you stepped out of the booth and went home to a frozen dinner and watching the telly. If the remote you got killed, you stepped back into the booth and the latest and greatest version was transmitted while you stopped on the way home, had a pint with some friends and grabbed some fish & chips on the way home. I used some British words because as I recall the main character was based in the UK.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
Theres...
There's the desire for 100% accuracy, and then there's nightmarish fridge logic. (There's also the tendency to throw in needless jargon and gobbledygook, to make it sound scientific. A satellite isn't in a north-south orbit around the earth, it's in a "north-south geosynchronous orbit".)
-- Daphne Xu