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BE excerpt Part 6 Chapter 5

....a Psychlo physicist named En had untangled the riddle. Prior to this, it was thought that teleportation consisted of converting energy and matter to space and then reconverting it in another place so it would assume its natural form. But this had never been proven. En had apparently found that space could exist entirely independent of time, energy, or mass and that all these things were actually seperate items. Only when comibined did they make up a universe.

Space was dependent only upon three coordinates. When one dictated a set of space coordinates one shifted space itself. Any energy or mass contained in that space thereupon shifted with the space shift.

In the matter of a motor such as this freighter had, it was just an enclosed housing in which space coordination could be changed. As the coordinates changed, the housing was forced to go along, and this gave the motor power. That explained why these planes were run by a switchboard and not a thrust through the air. They didn't have to have wings or controls. Much smaller housings in the tail and on each side had similar sets of coordinates fed into them to climb and bank. A series of coordiantes were progressively fed to the main motor and it simply went forward or backward as the housed space occupied each set of coordiantes in turn.

Teleportaion over vast distances worked the same way. Matter and energy were pinned to the space, and when it was exchanged with another space, they simply changed too. Thus matter and energy would seem to disappear in one place and appear in another. They didn't actually change. Only the space did.

BE excerpt from Part 26 chapter 1:

The "samespace" phenomena informed them that space "considered itself" identical on the principle of nearness. By a law of squares, the farther another point in space was away, the more "different" it was from the point of origin. Total difference did not occur until one reached a point approximately twenty-five thousand miles away.

Teleportation motors used this to run and they were quite different from transshipment functions. A motor ran on the principle that "samespace" resisted distortion heavily. The shorter the distance, the more the distortion. Thus the motor thrived on the refusal of space to distort. But here one was not moving an object; one was moving merely the position of the motor housing. You could even run a dozen motors in the same room and though they would cross-distort, they would function.

But to move an object cleanly, without destruction of it or harm to the transshipment rig, one had to have two sapces to coincide with each other, and space would not do that so long as it "considered itself' "samespace." You would get a mangled mess.

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BE excert from Introduction:

So what would pure science fiction be?

It has been surmised that science fiction must come from an age where science exists. At the risk of raising dispute and outcry - which I have risked all my life and received but not been bothered by, and have gone on and done my job anyway - I wish to point out some things.

Science fiction does not come after the fact of scientific discovery or development. It is the hearald of possibility. It is the plea that someone should work on the future. Yet it is not prophesy. It is the dream that preceeds the dawn when the inventor or scientist awakens and goes to his books or his lab saying, "I wonder whether I could make that dream come true in the world of real science."

You can go back to Lucian, second century A.D., or to Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) - who founded modern dynamical astronomy and who also wrote Somnium, an imaginary space flight to the moon - or to Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein, or to Poe or Verne or Wells and ponder whether this was really science fiction. Let us take an example: a man invents an eggbeater. A writer later writes a story about an eggbeater. He has not, thereby, written science fiction. Let us continue the example: a man writes a story about some metal that, when twiddled, beats an egg, but no such tool has ever before existed in fact. He has now written science fiction. somebody else, a week or a hundred years later, reads the story and says, "Well, well. Maybe it could be done." And makes an eggbeater. But whether or not it was possible that twiddling two pieces of metal would beat eggs, or whether or not anybody ever did it afterward, the man still has written science fiction.

How do you look at this word "fiction?" It is a sort of homograph. In this case it means two different things. A professor of literature knows it means "a literary work whose contents is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact; the category of literature comprising works of this kind including novels, short stories, and plays." It is derived from the Latin fictio, a making, a fashioning, from fictus, past participle of fingere, to touch, form, mold.

But when we join the word to "science" and get "science fiction," the word "fiction" aquires two meanings in the same use: 1) the scinece used in the story is at least partly ficitional; and 2) any story is fiction. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines science fiction as "fiction in which scientific developments and discoveries form an element of plot or background; especially a work of fiction based on prediction of future scientific possibilities."

...science fiction has to do with the material universe and sciences; these can include economics, sociology, medicine, and suchlike, all of which have a material base.


But there is more to this: science fiction, particularly in its Golden Age, had a mission,.....one got the very solid impression that they were doing a heavy job of beating the drum to get man to the stars.

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