Review - One step from Earth

What one invention would most profoundly affect mankind? Some sort of device that, when you have misplaced scissors and are walking round the house making that ‘scissors cutting’ motion with your forefingers actually illuminates the position of your scissors, or sounds a small chime at their location? Possibly. More probably it will be something transport related. This is the theory that Harry Harrison puts forward in ‘One step from Earth’, a collection of short stories about how the practical use of the teleporter (or, Matter Transmitter or ‘M.T.’ as it is referred to throughout) would affect mankind (the answer by the way, revealed in the last short story is: a lot).

Harrison reasonably proposes that the development of faster transport has had a profound effect upon the human race (at least that part of it that drive and can afford air travel); that a couple of centuries ago everyone walked, then we had canals and railways and cars and airplanes. In truth, one of the most socially profound technological travel inventions ever has been the sat-nav. This is because couples who would normally have made the discovery that, after however long they have been in a relationship, they now hate one another and would turn bickering about directions to the garden centre into a full blown row and hence split up, no longer have that opportunity. The sat-nav is responsible for extending relationships into injury time.

The history of the MT is the history of colonisation. The stories take place sequentially over many many thousands of years. Although the MT has been invented, allowing instant travel from point A to point B, no matter where that point B may be, you still have to get the point B MT to point B and this has to be done in a rocket ship and this takes time.

The story sequence starts with the MT already invented but still untrusted (the first earth creature on Mars via MT is a lab rat). By the time the collection ends, far in the future, MTs are now referred to as ‘doors’ and are used unthinkingly, to the extent that one of the characters has his home in the centre of an asteroid that cannot be accessed in any other was other than by his ‘door’. He realises with a chill that if the technology were to fail, he’d be left entombed in space and that nobody would know where he was.

The various used that a MT might be put to are explored. In one of the best stories in the collection, ‘Pressure’, the MT is essentially an escape hatch for three explorers who, in a spacegoing diving bell, have descended to the ‘surface’ of Jupiter and have no other way out. In other stories the MT is seen as a vehicle for prospectors to explore and exploit the far reaches of the galaxy.

Although not directly referenced, society obviously breaks down at some point during the outward expansion of mankind to the stars. This leads to some of the best stories in the collection, with technologically superior explorers making contact with former colonies that have forgotten what the MT is for and have slid back into whatever technological age they can sustain. Harrison clearly relishes this sort of plot and the collection includes two very different takes on it, including one where an armed medical team is dispatched to ensure that a plague on a recently recontacted world does not pose a threat to the rest of the galaxy. Possibly this is the natural conclusion of the development of both new strains of disease and modern travel and, in an age where bird flu or swine flu can become a pandemic through air travel, poses interesting questions about what one would do to stop the spread of disease.

There are some strong stories here, and some very strong ideas. Especially fun and surprising are the constant throwaway remarks that bring home just how different the world would be with the MT, with characters talking about commuting from their work to their home simply by stepping through a door – not bad when you consider they work on the Moon and live in Switzerland.