Ansible Online

An ansible is a hypothetical machine, capable of superluminal communication, and used as a plot device in science fiction literature. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible

I am a creature of habit and extremely risk averse in every aspect of life including my choice in reading material. Event the causal reader of this blog knows that I read the WSJ everyday- even their crappy weekend edition- and that I eschew the reading of fiction. I especially do not enjoy science fiction, so I was surprised that Orson Scott Card’s Speaker of the Dead was able to consume more than a few of my at-the-beach honeymoon days. Speaker is the second part of a trilogy involving a central character trying to reverse the effects of a xenocide (that’s right Xen) that he unwittingly committed as a child. In any case, it is years in the future and the human races has spread like locusts to approximately one hundred worlds in our universe and is one of only three known sentient species. While the human race in the book has managed to master space travel they have yet to discovered how to travel faster than the speed of light AKA time travel. And thank goodness because that is where I draw the line. The are two things I cannot work with in a Sci-fi piece, one is time travel and the other is robots with human emotions. I can take anything grossly oversized, aliens of all sorts, smart viruses, computers gone haywire and hell bent on human destruction, changelings, multiple comets heading towards earth, evil drows, Cheney… whatever nasty fantastical thing might appear on a sci-fi tv original or be in a sci-fi book club collection. I can take it, but something about time travel and moody robots just turns me off.

The idea of an ansible however interests me greatly. It sounds like a kind of smart internet that uses space particles instead of fiber optic wiring to instantaneously transfer information between terminals that may be decades of light years away. And it never breaks down.

In the novel, a colony of possibly renegade possible revolutionary earthlings is considering (I am in the third book , Xenocide, and still don't know the outcome) severing communication with the rest of the colonized worlds, including the motherland, by disconnecting from the ansible. One figure remarks that without that connection they would be utterly alone. At that moment I thought – So what. They are already a whole world surely they could make a go of it. They wouldn’t really be alone. Puny humans.

I thought of this heartfelt response again while I was scrambling around on the floor cursing my half an hour loss of internet connection. Literally, I felt I couldn’t get anything accomplished without it.

Puny human.