Destinies, January - February 1979 edited by Jim Baen

[james_davis_nicoll]

Destinies, January - February 1979 edited by Jim Baen

Comments

[ckd]

A different search finds three copies in university collections (Eastern New Mexico University, Indiana University, and the University of Pennsylvania). Eight bucks is still cheaper than travel to any of those....

[ba_munronoe]

Eastern New Mexico U has a great collection of science fiction: alas, they don't do interlibrary loans, and although I'm closer than you are, it's still 230 miles from Albuquerque. Where's my teleportation booth [1], darn it!?

[1] _Much_ more convenient than flying cars or jetpacks, although only if they've overcome that little "human fly" issue.

[jbwoodford]

It occurred to me that even if you manage to keep flies and other organisms out of the teleportation booth, you're still going to have a huge population of intestinal flora along for the ride. Not looking forward to being a human coliform....

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

When James expounded on the less-than-desirable consequences of most superpowers recently, I recall thinking that being a teleport would still be a nifty ability. What are the downsides?

[grimjim]

Partial or incomplete teleportation could be upsetting, unless the point is to cause harm. Control over what volume was selected for teleportation seems a vague thing, and possibly not easily learned without some trial and error.

[(Anonymous)]

Sleep walking is bad - but sleep-teleporting could be instantly fatal.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

But this isn't an intrinsic downside, which is what I was asking for. James pointed out that superspeed necessarily implies a super slowdown from the speedster's perception; that's intrinsic. Similarly, so what if you have super-strength if you don't have the correspondingly fine muscular control? That's intrinsic. Contrariwise, if you want to posit superfine muscular control along with super strength, that's two different superpowers, not one.

So what are the intrinsic downsides of teleportation?

[ba_munronoe]

It's all about sticking the landing - as in "not inside a solid object"