What is this teleportation-centered scifi short?

November 6, 2011 6:35 PM

Inspired by the recent posting of BLIT and its related stories to the blue ... Back in the 90s, I read several short stories by a single author about teleportation; it had your standard "some can do this, some can't, so we don't like to talk about it" tropes, and one I recall in particular had several teleporters' murders as the plot driver. Spoilers inside. I read it in a zine published for the palm pilot, but I don't know if that was its original format or not.

As I recall it, the organization that found and trained latent teleports gave them a classification or rank based on how much and how often they could teleport themselves or a separate object; the climax of the story I'm recalling was that the head of this organization was not himself a teleport, but instead had managed to reach very high levels of teleport-ability by killing natural teleports and injecting their spinal fluid (or something along those lines), followed by a fight between him and the teleport who discovered him. Neither could directly kill the other, since they were able to teleport incoming attacks away; nor could they kill each other by, say, teleporting their opponent's heart away, since they were constantly teleporting themselves in place as protection.

posted by spaceman_spiff to writing & language (6 answers total)

I don't know what it is but I think I want to read it.
posted by dgeiser13 at 8:47 AM on November 7, 2011 [1 favorite]

I have been beating my head into the desk over this because, even if I didn't read it, I vaguely remember someone telling me about it.

Here's what I can tell you after too much web browsing -

Niven did a bunch of teleportation things, and a bunch of psi powers things, but I'm pretty sure teleportation was always technology driven and not a psi talent in his stuff. But a duel where one science fictiony thing was added creating all kinds of possibilities is very Nivenish.

The teleportation as an innate human talent that can be trained up in some is very much a "The Stars My Destination" thing by Alfred Bester. And while he could have written such a story on the way there, I can't find any evidence that he did.

Ditto "The Witling" by Vernor Vinge. I don't think it fits that novel, though, but Vinge has a couple short stories where he played with an idea, then reworked a bunch of stuff in his idea for a novel. (I think it's a long shot).

Looking at authors who appear on lists with these guys hasn't really lead me anywhere.

Are you sure they're all by one author and it's not just an anthology of teleportation stories?
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 1:23 PM on November 7, 2011

It's definitely one author, possibly with just 2-3 stories. And not someone well-known - certainly none of the authors you mentioned, I'm quite familiar with them. :)
posted by spaceman_spiff at 2:07 PM on November 7, 2011

I started looking at well known authors because it seemed like I'd maybe had this story described to me and so it might be something from back in the day that was reprinted, and I was hoping for a hit on this if I started from these guys and branched out.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 7:01 PM on November 7, 2011

Hey, you might want to check this out!

Difficulty: Every Star Trek novel ever is in there because showing the same shuttle launch and landing sequence over and over would have broken Gene Roddenberry's special effects budget and bored the audience.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 7:51 PM on November 7, 2011

Was it in one of Steven Gould's books? I only read the first one, "Jumper," but there are two sequels.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:54 AM on November 8, 2011