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.

[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.