New Year’s Miscellany

The Transporter Kills Kirk Meme, Reader Appreciation, and A Book Recommendation

Happy New Year! I have a few brief, unrelated things for you today that are in my head and that I want to get out of it.

Before we jump in, I’ll share that my literary New Years’ resolutions are to continue studying old science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction and to finally read Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness. These two classics are tangentially related to science fiction in theme and in that Philip José Farmer wrote a science fiction sequel to the former and that Roger Zelazny wrote a science fiction response to the latter.

Do you have any literary New Years’ resolutions? Drop me a comment and let me know what you’re reading, writing, etc. aspirations are for 2025.

Does The Transporter in Star Trek Kill Kirk?

I’ll start by saying I have always hated this question. I have tended to interact with it in the person of an edgy philosophical boy or man being like, “Psst… Did you know Kirk dies every time and the man on the other end is a copy of him?”

The thing is this take intentionally misapprehends how the Star Trek transporter works. It doesn’t make a copy! It literally reconstitutes Kirk out of the same matter it dematerializes and beams to a second location. Insofar as Kirk dies, it’s like a person dying briefly on the operating table and being revived before brain damage sets in (but without the physical trauma). No great philosophical problems should arise from this.

And yet smart people make hay over it. Take for example China Miéville who riffs on the idea in his 2010 urban fantasy novel Kraken: An Anatomy by introducing the element of the immortal soul into the equation. In that novel, a Trekkie magic user is haunted by the ghosts of his many previous selves who were killed by casting transporter spells. My beef is that the whole philosophical problem in Kraken hinges on an implicit regime of how old souls get separated from bodies and new souls enter them. Pretty woo woo if you ask me.

Now you can set up what philosophy calls the “teletransportation paradox” in an interesting way that raises life and death philosophical questions but the transporter can’t work like the one in Star Trek. Case in point, I recently read Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, a novella published in the December 1960 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction six years before the advent of Star Trek. (There is also a 1960 novel-length version of Rogue Moon that I have not read.)

Budrys’ transporter specifically breaks down and kills the person put into it. In Rogue Moon, the protagonist Dr. Edward Hawks, a Cold Warrior and research vice president at a stand-in for GE, breaks men apart to make a master copy of their electronic pattern. Hawks then transmits the pattern via radio wave to a transporter on the moon where a copy of the disassembled man is produced from moon stuff. At the same time, the pattern is also sent by cable to a second transporter in Hawks’ lab which also makes a copy. Hawks repeatedly calls himself a murderer and his main subject Al Barker, whose copies die on the moon on a daily basis, a suicide. I’m not sure if this thought experiment was original in 1960 but it certainly is not today.

Of course, reusing and reconsidering ideas can be a rich practice in science fiction literature. As recently as the September-October 2024 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the teletransportation paradox surfaced in a comedy story by Wil McCarthy titled “The Fyootch” which imagines the copies coming out the other end in a slap happy euphoria with altered personalities. The idea of infidelity in the copy was already in Rogue Moon but like everything in Budrys’ novella, it was used in the service of character work about very serious, insufferable men.

All this to say, Rogue Moon isn’t the final word in these matters either on the level of thought experiment or on the level of literature. But it is an expansive starting point for the Kirk killers in your life.

Reader Appreciation

I want to explicitly thank my readers for making me feel like I’m actually doing something here. In particular, I was moved by the overwhelmingly positive feedback on my birthday post where I discussed my struggles with Bipolar 1. Among other responses, y’all told me I had a good bedside manner and a “brain the size of a wheelbarrow” and bought me nine coffees. A special shout-out to Dan Hall, a man I have never met, who is one of my earliest customers and readers and who also has the distinction of being the first person to buy me a coffee.

Book Recommendation

I’m going to risk recommending a book that I have only just started reading in hopes of finding someone to discuss it with. The book is The Issue At Hand by William Atheling, Jr., edited and with an introduction by James Blish, a collection of science fiction criticism. Atheling was a pseudonym Blish used to write fanzine columns in the 1950s in which he did reviews of contemporaneous science fiction magazine stories. Long after the cat was out of the bag on Atheling’s identity, the first set of these reviews was collected in 1964 as The Issue At Hand.

Atheling-Blish’s columns largely sought to demonstrate what he viewed as widespread failings of the then-allegedly-mature genre on the level of literature in general and on the level of science fiction literature in particular. His goal was to step on toes, get readers and editors to demand better, and get practitioners to work on their craft.

What strikes me about “Sour Bill” is that despite his biting criticisms, he was very ambitious about what the future of science fiction might be. He was unsatisfied with science fiction attaining the social standing of the detective novel. He wanted to go further and for science fiction to be a mainstream, unghettoized literature.

I ultimately don’t agree with this goal for science fiction as a genre. It’s vital for science fiction to be available to general readers but the genre standing a little outside of the mainstream gives it (oft unrealized) countercultural potential. Still, it’s sad to read about Atheling-Blish and others’ goals of mainstreaming because today’s science fiction literature seems to be in a worse ghetto than that of yore in the sense that today’s science fiction dwells in a fantasy ghetto that doesn’t quite seem to appreciate its special qualities vis-a-vis other kinds of imaginative literature. I’ve allowed myself to go afield here because my digression tends to show how generative for thinking The Issue At Hand is.

My final pitch for you picking up The Issue At Hand is that it’s like this blog except written by a contemporary observer who is much crankier than I am and who has the literary chops to opine systematically about what’s right and wrong in mid-century science fiction. Drop me a line if you pick up a copy by replying to this email, emailing me here, or pressing the blue button below. Maybe we can do a little book club.

A Financial Appeal To Help A Sick Cat

Jazz is an affectionate and attractive tabby.

People who know me know I am enthralled by cats. My partner Meg and I have two cats who live in our house and we also feed and help take care of eight community (feral) cats that frequent our backyard and sunroom. We just took a big hit to our net worth paying for life-saving surgery for Jazz, the community cat pictured above.

As such, now would be a great time to buy me a coffee (or rather, 0.29% of a cat surgery) or to peruse my eBay store.

I also have a big inventory of vintage science fiction and fantasy paperbacks not listed online that I can sell for $5/book or 5 books for $20 plus cost of USPS media mail. If you’re interested in taking a peak at some choice cuts of my inventory reply to this email, email me here, or message me via the blue button below.