A few years in the future a private company, backed by the US Department of Defense, have been field-testing the “poster”, a device twice the size of an old telephone booth which teleports things from anywhere to anywhere else. This isn’t exactly the classic “matter-transmitter” though: rather than objects moving from A to B, here space itself is altered, the departure and destination points made “congruent” and, for an instant, the object’s actual location indefinite. And if the difference doesn’t sound important, it sure is because manipulating this effect begins to have disastrous ramifications.
    They begin tentatively enough, posting inanimate objects such as parcels of documents, but the next step is human volunteers. And for a time that seems to be going without a hitch too—until the day a military courier, materialising in the receiving booth inside an embassy somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, steps out, asks a completely incomprehensible question and, getting nothing but baffled looks in return, immediately destroys his portfolio of documents and shoots himself.
    One possibility is that things posted, particularly people, are arriving at their destination changed in some way; so Justin Williams, one of the device’s inventors, has himself posted—and reappears at the receiving end to find himself unchanged, but the world itself altered. What’s going on? Far more than they’d bargained for is what. As the poster-team and their backers try to make sense of what’s happening, further postings just cause the whole situation to unravel further…
    It does me good reading these. Like a bucket of cold water in the face, a dose of no-nonsense, straight-down-the-middle science fiction clears the head wonderfully! There is more to this story—the nature of infinity, of identity too; free will versus determinism—but above all it’s just good clean fun. ( )

Not the John Brunner I am accustomed to.

( )

review of
John Brunner's The Infinitive of Go
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 15, 2014

I'm not exactly cranking out the reviews so far this yr. That's partially b/c I'm in the midst of very slowly reading William Gaddis's The Recognitions AND Florian Cramer's Anti-Media. As such, I squeeze in the relatively easy reading of Brunner bks in the midst of the Gaddis & the Cramer to give myself a rest - wch is NOT to say that the Brunner bks are inferior!

The Infinitive of Go revisits Brunner's Meeting at Infinity (1961) (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6255214-meeting-at-infinity ) insofar as it explores parallel universes AND it revisits Brunner's A Web of Everywhere (1974) (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13261131-web-of-everywhere ) insofar as it explores teleportation. As such, it didn't strike me as groundbreaking for Brunner but I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

The opening epigraph of Chapter One reads:

"
to travel faster
than a speeding bullet
is not much help
if you and it
are heading straight
towards each other
" - p 1

Ha ha! Technology may solve some problems but, like medical drugs w/ their inevitable side-effects, may just aggravate others.

"Sometimes, he thought bitterly, Chester reminded him more than anybody of the Moslem warlord who burned the great library of Alexandria, on the grounds that if the manuscripts therein agreed with the Koran they were superfluous, and if they disagreed they were heretical." - p 9

& there we have the basis of my argument against religion encapsulated. Just as Christians have proposed the notion of "One Way" (ie: their way & no-one else's) so did a Moslem burn the world's greatest body of knowledge. NOW, I detest religion - esp the 2 main perpetually warring gangs: the Moslems & the Christians. However, in the interest of fairness, I quote the following Wikipedia article as a way to show that the Moslems may've gotten a bad rep in relation to the burning of the Alexandrian library that they may not entirely deserve:

"The famous burning of the Library of Alexandria, including the incalculable loss of ancient works, has become a symbol of the irretrievable loss of public knowledge. Although there is a mythology of "the burning of the Library at Alexandria", the library may have suffered several fires or acts of destruction of varying degrees over many years. Ancient and modern sources identify several possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

"During Caesar's Civil War, Julius Caesar was besieged at Alexandria in 48 BC. Many ancient sources describe Caesar setting fire to his own ships and state that this fire spread to the library, destroying it.

"[W]hen the enemy endeavored to cut off his communication by sea, he was forced to divert that danger by setting fire to his own ships, which, after burning the docks, thence spread on and destroyed the great library.
—Plutarch, Life of Caesar

Bolstering this claim, in the 4th century both the pagan historian Ammianus and the Christian historian Orosius wrote that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina had been destroyed by Caesar's fire. However, Florus and Lucan claim that the flames Caesar set only burned the fleet and some "houses near the sea". Years after Caesar's campaign in Alexandria, the Greek geographer Strabo claimed to have worked in the Alexandrian Library.

"The library seems to have continued in existence to some degree until its contents were largely lost during the taking of the city by the Emperor Aurelian (270–275 AD), who was suppressing a revolt by Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. During the course of the fighting, the areas of the city in which the main library was located were damaged. Some sources claim that the smaller library located at the Serapeum survived, though Ammianus Marcellinus wrote of the library in the Serapeum temple as a thing of the past, destroyed when Caesar sacked Alexandria.

"Paganism was made illegal by an edict of the Emperor Theodosius I in 391 AD. The temples of Alexandria were closed by Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria in AD 391. The historian Socrates of Constantinople describes that all pagan temples in Alexandria were destroyed, including the Serapeum. Since the Serapeum housed a part of the Great Library, some scholars believe that the remains of the Library of Alexandria were destroyed at this time. However, it is not known how many, if any, books were contained in it at the time of destruction, and contemporary scholars do not mention the library directly.

"In 642 AD, Alexandria was captured by the Muslim army of Amr ibn al `Aas. Several later Arabic sources describe the library's destruction by the order of Caliph Omar. Bar-Hebraeus, writing in the 13th century, quotes Omar as saying to Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī: "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them." Later scholars are skeptical of these stories, given the range of time that had passed before they were written down and the political motivations of the various writers." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Tangent over (sortof). Much later in the novel, Brunner has the Christians be the ones stomping on knowledge: "The worst problem came from a handful of Christians who had been invited to join the team; they proved to be fundamentalist to a man, and Landini in their terms was necessarily a tool of Satan. The fact that he admitted to being a non-practicing Catholic aggravated matters . . ." (pp 110-111)

"A fifth channel: a fundamentalist preacher was declaring with enormous fervor that Landini must be a devil because the only intelligent beings the Lord ever created were Adam and Eve, and they were white, and their original sin was to engage in relations with their own children in order to propagate the species, and that was why the Lord made some of their children black, and if anything that stood up on its hind legs and talked to you wasn't precisely like Adam and Eve that was a sure sign that creature was accursed and the blessing of the Lord would rest upon anyone who got it, and the Godless servants of Satan who were trying to foist it on an unenlightened public, in the sights of a rifle and had it skinned and mounted and presented it to a church or a museum where the faithful for ever after might inspect the work of the Evil One . . ." - p 140

"When he sent his one and only published paper on the poster principle to a carefully-selected journal known for its hospitality to avant-garde ideas and its willingness to reprint lengthy computer analyses of the type known jokingly as "yet another four-color problem"—after the classic computer-exhaustive list of solutions to that classic poser in topology—he had been firmly convinced that it would instantly be recognized as a breakthrough. He had dared to hope it might be called a work of genius." - p 11

Ha ha! Seems like the kind of journal that wd print something by me. I wonder if Brunner had any particular journal in mind as an inspiration?

In the world that the main character, Justin, starts out in, Chester gets Dept of Defense funding to develop Justin's teleporter (called a "poster"). "What it amounted to was this: he had become a weapon, and against his will." (p 12) A typical problem of scientists whose work depends on massive funding that only the military or insidious corporate interests are capable of providing.

Brunner is great at depicting social scenes in wch personality quirks are deftly skecthed:

""You haven't met these people before," Levi said, giving Lane a skeletal grin. "They aren't scientists. They're magicians. They invent terms as and when they need to. What's rho-space? It's where the object goes which is being shifted from transmitter to receptor at the speed of light! I was told that something moving that fast would acquire infinite mass. Yes, they say, so it must. So where's the mass? It manifests as energy. Now just a moment, I say! You're using a lot of energy for the transfer, but it isn't infinite! Of course not, they say. The surplus doesn't even show up as heat. Of course not, they say. Where is it? It's in rho-space, they say. Are you any the wiser? I swear I'm not!"" - p 26

Now, I often write these reviews in a way that deliberately avoids plot-spoilers & that deliberately encourages personal tangents. Hence I quote the epigraph at the beginning of Chapter Eleven b/c it reinforces my own reasoning for not taking sleeping pills:

"
two sleeping-pills as always
bringing guaranteed oblivion
in the night of a whirlwind
by day a cold awakening
in a room full of wreckage
with only the sky for a ceiling
" - p 72

This "guaranteed oblivion" seems like all too poignantly comparable to the way that most people, in the US at least, seem unaware of just how much their personal liberty has been eroded away post-9/11 - & Brunner's novel seems to anticipate this somewhat:

"Instead of treating the situation as though it were the result of enemy action, drafting blanket legislation of a type previously seen only during a war—which, Justin had often sourly thought, was largely intended to ensure that as many citizens as possible could legally be entered in Federal computer-files" - p 72

It's always interesting for me when SF writers imagine future-tech & then try to describe it in a potentially believable way: "["]The device is conventionally termed a 'poster'. It is not"—he recalled Cinnamon's annoyance when Lane said people were being scrambled—"the matter transmitter familiar as a science-fiction prop. There is not direct communication between the dispatching and the receiving ends; the space within them is rendered congruent under the control of advancing computer systems and the location of the object being transferred becomes indefinite, so that it so to say shuttles from one to the other." (p 95) What's particularly interesting here is the side-effect of the process being "under the control of advancing computer systems" & the way Brunner develops that. BUT, I don't want to give too much away.

""The total dimensionality of the universe is of an order of aleph-four and may well be as high as aleph-five—in other words, much more infinite than infinity. Don't ask me for a quick course in Cantorian transfinities, please!["]" - p 127

Well, I looked them up in my own excellent Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory) bk - specifically on page "356 surreal numbers" in the "GLOSSARY: terms" section & all I found was this measly: "transfinite numbers = Georg Cantor's term for infinitely large numbers". That doesn't tell us much now does it? But it DID give me an excuse to reference my unpublished bk that I wrote over 6 yrs ago.

Parallel World history is always fun as either an example of wishful thinking or as dystopian warning or whatever: "This Adolf Hitler of yours: near as I can figure, he corresponds to a pan-Germanic fanatic who acquired a small following during the economic depression but murdered his lover, a guy called Roehm, and spent the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum writing crazy letters to the government about Jewish money-lenders." / "What about Stalin?" someone demanded. / "He didn't change his name. As Iosip Dzhugashvili he did more than anyone to bring about reform in Russia!" / "The Viet-Nam war!" came another shout. / "You mean when the nationalists took over from the French colonial power?"" (pp 136-137) ( )

Here is a world where the first matter transporter has just been invented. But on the third test, he who went into the transporter is not who came back out!

This is an interesting story, and Brunner does a good job of fleshing out the single sci fi idea. But, the story overall falls pretty flat, and doesn't quite go anywhere. This felt more like an extended short story than an actual novel, with its single idea and 'punch-line' resolution ending. ( )

A neat little transporter novel. The gimmick is that when you transport you end up in a parallel universe whose similarity to yours is governed by the distance you teleport. The greater the distance, the greater the difference. So the central protagonist transports and begins to notice subtle differences, and Brunner has fun with that. Brunner does some infodumping with Transfinite math to explain the proceedings, and he's done (which is a characteristic Brunner MO). Could have been something great if it were longer, but it's fun as it is. ( )