Book Review: The Infinitive of Go

This book makes me feel old. It looks like it should be in my Dad's book collection. The one in the basement that's full of books from the 60's where all the pages have gone yellow and have a certain style to the cover art. You know the collection. I'll grant you that 1980 was awhile back now. And that I'm now the age that Dad would have been when I was going through his books looking for something to read. But that's still no reason for my books to go and start pointing out how old I am. That's just rude.

It's also a great argument for going back to hemp for paper production. Go back 100 years and a bit and paper was made of linen and hemp and stuff like that. With wood pulp came acid and it's the acid that yellows the pages and makes our books fall apart. There are 400 year old books in museums that are in better condition than my copy of "The Infinitive of Go" simply because they were printed on hemp. Same thing with The Constitution and Declaration of Independence. They're printed on hemp paper.

Yes, I am one of those damn hippies who wants hemp legalized. More the non-THC containing, industrial hemp than the "duuude. You ever look at your fingers? I mean REALLY look at your fingers?" variety. But I probably wouldn't turn down a hit if I were on chemotherapy.

Oh. Right. I was supposed to talk about a book.

We're all familiar with transporters. We've all seen Star Trek. When you start thinking about them in terms of real world use some problems pop up. Does it take you apart, move you elsewhere, and rebuild you? Does it make a copy of you and destroy the original? Does it bend space and drop you out somewhere else? None of these methods are high on the "We can totally do that" scale.

In this book a couple of researchers found a way to make it work by sending a person through a quantum mess in rho space. (Jump to next paragraph to skip the shaky science) When working with quantum anything you have to understand that the idea is that there are an infinite number of universes and that we can draw on similar devices in those other universes. In the double slit experiment interference patterns are thought by some to be created by photons fired through a couple of slits in a sheet and interfering with by the same photon in alternate universes. Quantum computing is supposed to be powerful because instead of just being one computer in one universe there are identical computers built in other universes and each of the computers attacks a problem in a different way so one of them gets the correct answer and feeds it back to you. (warning: explanations are over simplified to the point of not being 100% correct) And in this story they're getting around some of the more difficult problems in moving a person from transporter to transporter with a quantum fixit.

Well, the way things worked out, what you were doing was sending things and people to other transporters in other dimensions. So long as the transporters are fairly close to each other the differences are fairly minor. All tests indicate that the person who went in is the same person who came out. Sometimes the people were a bit disoriented, but they got past it. But when a spy with an important package was sent through the first intercontinental test something went wrong. He hadn't been given a phrase to listen for on the other side, but he still demanded one. Failing to get it, he incinerated the package and shot himself.

Well, the pressure is on the inventors to figure out why this happened. It wasn't until the inventor went through the same way the spy did that he figured it out. When his rather cold co-inventor jumped his bones that night he realized that he wasn't in Kansas anymore.

The transporters were shut down completely. While trying to figure out how to fix this little problem another problem pops up. Someone working on a space station was crushed and needs immediate medical aid. Reentry would kill him. The only way he'd survive is to be transported down. What came out the other end was even more different than what came out when beamed across the ocean.

I'm not overly familiar with the work of John Brunner. I think I've heard the name, but I can't tell you where. This book isn't going on my top 100 books, but it was a quick and enjoyable read. I never hesitated to pick it back up, but kept putting off when I'd have to put it down. If you're a sci-fi junky like me then you'll want to grab a copy if you see one in your local used book store. If you're not a sci-fi junky then hand the book off to your semi-nerdy mid-teens nephew.