Kate, our resident Information Officer, fastidious to a tee, spotted that there is a novel of some description called ‘transmat’ and wondered how much I had pinched from it to make my last blog post. The answer is none. I suspect the term ‘transmat’ is quite old, as I got it from an 80’s computer game (was it ‘Spellbound’?). The idea of instant matter transfer has long been a popular one , Star Trek’s famous transporters being an example. I had a read of the excerpts of the book at Maxine’s Music Plus, but it makes the same assumptions that I find absurd in a lot of Sci Fi:

At first TransMat seemed harmless. After an initial stormy period, humanity happily adjusted to a solar system where personal travel was inexpensive, non-pollutant, and instantaneous.

In so much Sci Fi, the authors still persist in having inexpensive, pollution-free, instantaneous technological solutions to minor modern-day inconveniences. Ecology and entropy should tell us there is no such thing.

All conveniences have a cost. We get to choose within limits who pays the cost and how. Nuclear power’s Social, health, and environmental costs are supposedly outstandingly moderate, though citizens of Cernobyl may disagree. For a while, i’d been thinking about the practicalities of matter transfer using existing technology. Of course my ignorance is a blessing here. Optimistic filling-in of the gaps in my knowledge have made my little future possible. But what makes it interesting to me is what are the costs? What is the mechanism by which this fantasy might be realised, and how might it fall short of the fantasy?

To me that’s what makes a Sci Fi a Sci Fi. A lot of Sci Fi is really fantasy, with added space ships, time travel, or laser beams.

To me, Sci Fi is concerned with projecting outcomes. Thus it will normally be set in the future, and thus inevitably, will contain speculations about future technology, lifestyle and/or politics. It’s a fine line, but sometimes these speculations are more closely derived from the premise than others. In the worst Sci Fi, the technology comes as a free plot-device.

Star Trek for example is particularly lazy in this respect. At the start of an episode: “Captain we’re stranded cos the flux dilithiator is mogrified and I can’t unstooble it without parts from star fleet” and at the end of each episode “well I tried broadening the bandwidth of the finkle compensator and now it’s all better!” How is the watcher supposed to engage with that? Answer: as a work of fantasy.