Seeing Ear Theatre: Propagation of Light in a Vacuum - Part 1 & Part 2 (James Patrick Kelly)

[james_davis_nicoll]

Propagation of Light in a Vacuum - Part 1
Propagation of Light in a Vacuum - Part 2

The lone survivor of an interstellar mission struggles with reality on the other side of the light barrier.

There's a definite subgenre of stories based on the idea that Weird Shit happens when you go faster than light: James Blish's "Common Time" is one example and Le Guin's "Dancing to Ganam" is another. Oh, wait: add Asimov's "Escape!" as well.

This would be the subset of that sub-genre that I call "powered by sheer nonsense and if the running commentary of the protagonist is any guide, a near complete lack of understanding of the physics involved," overlapping with "Wow, women issues much?" But at least it ran for 47 minutes.

Cast:
Paul Giamatti as The Spaceman
Alissa Hunnicutt as The Imaginary Wife
Christine Lavren as Varina & Computer Voice
George Zarr as Old Man
Jef Betz as Young Man

Comments

[oh6]

After skimming this while washing dishes I listened to it in some detail during a bout of insomnia. The role of the exterior of the ship reminds me a little of another Kelly story, "The Wreck of the Godspeed".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Confession: I've always kind of liked the "Weird Shit happens in the unknown zone" narrative in general, though they can be done better or worse.

"Escape!" seriously freaked me out when I was a kid; in that case, the weirdness seems to be not so much a natural phenomenon as the doing of a disturbed supercomputer with a Three Laws-based OS.

Cordwainer Smith wrote more than one of this type as well, the Rimbaud homage "Drunkboat" being the most obvious. Though I guess in that case it was a particular way of going faster than light that was at issue: they already had planoforming by then, which just had relatively mundane phenomena, like invisible insanity monsters that you had to fight off with mini-interceptors piloted by telepathically linked cats.

Also, Philip Jose Farmer's "The Shadow of Space". I still boggle at the idea that that was originally written as a Star Trek episode treatment. It would have been the greatest episode ever made, it would have blown the entire budget, and the show would have been immediately yanked off the air forever.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...though, yeah, many of the details of "The Shadow of Space" betray its origins as a Star Trek story pretty blatantly: the raving insane lady who thinks the cap'n is her dead husband getting into the Engineering section and messing with the star drive, one step ahead of the Scottish chief engineer...

[schizmatic.livejournal.com]

So... Suppose that one were not a huge SF reader but also enjoys the concept of hyperspace in which... Things lurk. What would some good starting points be either in terms of short fiction or novels?

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

I suspect that Niven's hyperspace retcon about the Lurking Horrors was inspired by The Game of Rat and Dragon.

Smith would have made his bones at one go with that one if he hadn't made them many times over by the time it was published.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind that that claim was made, and all evidence provided, by a protector.

Protectors lie.

It saves time.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

I think we saw one of these things fall to the ground in Ringworld's Children. I don't regard this or the other two followups as canon, but there you have it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The thing I like the most about Cordwainer Smith's faster-than-light drive is that, probably because everyone else had ships going into the fourth dimension, he flipped it and insisted that they went faster than light by becoming two-dimensional. Somehow.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

That makes perfect sense; it's like that old engraving where the lady leaning out of the upper story of her house is lighting a gentleman's pipe on a faraway hill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire_on_False_Perspective). The hard part is recovering the fibers after the jump ;-)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...There's one of these stories that I haven't been able to ID since I saw it: I think it was in an old Analog, and most of it consists of ponderous speeches by the faster-than-light traveler in which he relays the amazing insights he received.

At one point I think he announces that, contrary to those who believe that only zero, one or infinity truly exists, the most important number is actually the number two. (Why, I have no recollection, if indeed I actually read his explanation.)

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Do you remember any other details? There's a Christopher Anvil that's kind of the same only completely the opposite: An ftl (via subspace) "proof" that integers and rationals do not have the same cardinality.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Nope. I think there was an illustration, showing a guy surrounded by... stuff.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Huh. So that's two Heinlein stories with cardinality crankery, and now an Anvil. Is there a vein of infinity nuttery running through science fiction that I've just not noticed before?

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

What counts as an old Analog to you? 1970s, '80s...?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, in his first editorial Trevor Quachri explained that he hoped people would think of Analog as the up-to-date with-it magazine that published ``Weyr Search'' and ``Who Goes There?''.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was just asking in order to narrow down the range for a possible search for the story.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I was thinking ``old Analog'' as in ``old-school Analog'' or ``old-fashioned Analog''.
I have an excellent excuse for not understanding the obvious which I will provide as soon as I think it up.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

We have a Filter Queen. It's opaque.

I just had to get that out of the buffer.