First up, let me make a full and proper disclosure, plus an apology to the Star Trek fans. I didn’t watch your show when I was growing up. That’s not to say it isn’t cool. It’s just that I lived in country towns until I was a teenager, and TV stations were limited to just […]
“Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures–in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing [people] together.” Quotes and misquotes play an important role in Twinmaker, riffing on the idea of words as well as people not surviving transmission intact. (I talked […]
The world’s first matter transmitter story was published in 1877. It was written by an amazing guy, Edward Page Mitchell, who was also the first to write about time machines, intelligent computers, cryogenics, mutants, cyborgs, and invisibility, beating not just H. G. Wells to at least two of those tropes but everyone else as well. […]
So, I wrote a PhD, and guess what? It was on matter transmitters. I found out the day I left for England that it had been accepted. Here’s the intro, which goes some way towards outlining why I think d-mat is so cool. Warning: it’s pretty dry! I have added a lolcat chaser, but even […]