hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison) (08/07/84)
< They pelted us with rocks and garbage >
For an interesting analysis of matter transmission as a stored
record phenomenon, see "Farthest Star" and "Wall Around A Star"
by Frederick Pohl and Jack Williamson.
This was collected as "The Saga of Cuckoo" by Sci Fi book club.
It has all sorts of interesting ramifications. The transmitter
does NOT transmit. It makes a copy. Energy and matter are fed
in the receiver and reformatted into an exact copy of the item
(however complex) in the sender.
They did get into the moral and human implications of this.
Ignore the ending, it seems to be more of their rather insipid
techno-humanist crapola. The real story comes in the effects of
this one new technology on all the races, and the whole Cuckoo
thing merely provides a not-too-original not-very-plausible conflict
to catalyze the action.
Hutch
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