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

[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...