Ansible stories?

[sunnyskywalker]

Over at a recap/deconstruction of Speaker for the Dead, it's mentioned in passing how utterly weird ansible communication plus relativistic travel could make things. Like so:

I mean, imagine that back in 1900 CE we were all in contact by magic instant radio with England, and they're all "Oi, Germany seems like it could be the centre of some big trouble, want to pop over and help keep an eye on things" and we're all "Hell yeah, let me get in my relativistic boat", and then we arrive a century later and now they're all "No worries, nothing a couple of world wars and the devastation of Russia couldn't solve, too bad you missed the Beatles, but have you heard of One Direction" and in a panic we radio home and Canada is like "We're still super-racist to First Nations and Inuit but check out this marriage equality" and then the USA busts in with "Check out mah nukes I'VE BEEN TO THE MOON" and this is happening all over the galaxy all the time. You might as well have Leifr Eiríksson trying to make conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. The idea of 'history' becomes a complete mess. God, I hope that's what this book is about.

Spoiler: it isn't what the book is about.

But what about the books that are about that? Does anyone have any recs? (Besides The Forever War, which doesn't quite cover the grand scope envisioned here--that's more of a fish-out-of-water protagonist deal.)

I am now really curious to see someone actually handle this concept well.

Comments

[slashmarks]

Now I want to write a book like that except I have no idea what doing it well would even look like. I mean, on a small scale it's not overly hard, plug people into situations and you can usually approximate their reactions by thinking about the emotions, but on the large, galactic scale you need in order to figure out what those situations are -- wow that's a mess.

[sunnyskywalker]

Exactly! Le Guin sort of started it and showed the effects for a few individual characters, but I don't remember a work of hers that handled it on a large scale (though I haven't read all the Hainish books). It seems like a sprawling multi-generational family saga spread across the galaxy would fit well, with the generations not staying in chronological order like they usually do. But figuring out all the different situations, and how they evolve, and how that would all be affected by instantaneous communication but also some number (how many?) of people periodically showing up essentially having time-traveled from the past... yeah, a mess.

[slashmarks]

The nonlinear family chronology does sound very interesting. I keep having ideas that might fit very well small scale, like, what do you do when you make friends with someone online/fall in love, and know that if you traveled to where they are by the time you got there they'd be dead? But the worldbuilding must be very complex.

On the other hand, it isn't as if we DON'T have the kind of mixed technology levels implied here, too. Trade really couldn't occur except for trading the kind of things that can be transmitted with communication technology -- plans, digital art, music, etc. I wonder if you'd have design trade via 3d printers?

[sunnyskywalker]

That would be the saddest internet friendship/romance. Le Guin's short story "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" has one of the protagonist's mothers immigrated far enough that she couldn't go home and see anyone she knew, and he goes to an off-world university that puts him about 10 years behind each way (until things get... weird). But that was about leaving people behind, not forming relationships with people you could never meet in person.

The 3d printer idea makes me wonder how you would handle copyright and patents (if they exist in more-or-less recognizable forms) for those who did choose to travel between planets. Like, we now grant them for a certain term under the assumption that people all have to go through time at the same pace. Suppose you copyright or patent something and get then on a space ship that will dump you 100 years into the future? Should your rights be extended to be length of trip + whatever? Should getting on a space ship automatically put everything of yours in the public domain? (One more cost to consider before traveling...)

Also, you couldn't physically intervene in wars on other planets (unless the wars lasted for decades, but you couldn't count on that when deciding whether or not to send a ship or three out). Would you research printable weapons or other useful things and ansible the plans to whichever side you want to support? Try to insert subliminal messages into your ansible communications to the other side? Maybe send them really annoyingly catchy music that gets stuck in their heads omg why can't we stop singing along about how we're tyrants doomed to lose.

[slashmarks]

No kidding! The thought of ten year travel does make an interesting dilemma, though, as opposed to a hundred years where they'll definitely be dead -- will they wait for you that long? Can a relationship stand up to that kind of stress?

Hrm, that's an interesting point. On the other hand you tend to have a lot of variation in copyright law between location here, too. I wonder if you would have regional copyrights, say, where something is protected only for a certain amount of time in one location.

What occurs to me here is that assuming instantaneous communication you would probably have quite a bit of interference via espionage methods -- brute forcing encryptions set by civilizations with less computing power, say. On the other hand if trade and travel are very limited there may be less incentive for interfering in the first place.

[sunnyskywalker]

There wouldn't be much point fighting over resources you couldn't possibly even acquire for centuries. Human societies just don't operate well trying to make decisions on that kind of time-scale. Stealing things like computer programs or designs or creative works that can be stored electronically, though, maybe? Not a war so much as constant hacking.

I suspect things like programs and designs would be more sought-after, but now I have the idea of the Great Rerun Cyberwar where there's a years-long battle of hacking and counter-hacking over a really great show one planet won't license to be played more than once on another planet.

[slashmarks]

Yeah, and people would come up with ways of attacking through the communications networks -- so war would look very different, but it would exist. (Or would it? If you can find someone to build them for you, you can control drones via communication. So you might just have robot soldiers constructed on world instead of sending your own people.)

Hahaha, probably it happens at least once. (And there's no way to force people to comply with your local law, because of course extradition is impossible...)

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

It looks like you need to read the books of Ursula K LeGuin (a good idea anyway) as the ansible was her idea in the first place.

[sunnyskywalker]

I've read The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness and know the origin of the term, but both those stories focused heavily on local events or on relations between a world and a moon so close that this wasn't really a factor. The characters weren't constantly, every chapter, dealing with the effects of thousands (or more) of people traveling between worlds being constantly out of sync with everything. Do other books in the Hainish Cycle deal more with that?

The idea seems ripe for one of those sprawling multi-generational family sagas, only instead of generations succeeding each other more or less neatly, you have to account for twenty-something Great-Great-Grandma showing up and taking back control of her bank accounts from her elderly nephew, only she's not caught up on the politics of the day, and wait, now her father has finally arrived on another planet and is back in contact again...