TRANSPORTATION

   Sf stories based on serious speculations about future means of transportation are greatly outnumbered by stories in which those means function as facilitating devices - i.e., as convenient ways of shifting characters into an alien environment. Inevitably, the same kinds of machines crop up in both categories of story because stories of the second kind borrow heavily from those of the first. SPACESHIPS have been employed by sf writers almost exclusively as a literary device; few stories deal speculatively with the real possibilities of interplanetary and interstellar transportation. Much fruitless argument has been wasted comparing the plausibility of machines designed for quite different literary functions. One such argument, of long standing, concerns the relative merits of the space-gun in Jules VERNE's From the Earth to the Moon (1865-70: trans 1873) and the ANTIGRAVITY device in H.G. WELLS's THEFIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901), which tends to ignore the fact that only the former device aspires (unsuccessfully) to practicability.In FANTASTIC VOYAGES written before the mid-19th century virtually all modes oftransport were facilitating devices. Today, the short-sightedness of the anonymous The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925 (1763), which is optimistic about the bright future of the canal barge, seems slightly absurd; but the author of the book lived in a world in which there had been no significant advance in motive power for 2000 years. John WILKINS, fascinated by ideas of novel means of transportation, had discussed submarines, flying machines and land-yachts at some length in Mathematicall Magick (1648), but even he touched only tentatively on the possibility of adapting new POWER SOURCES to the business of transport. This situation underwent arevolutionary change in the 19th century.The first practical steamboat, The Charlotte Dundas, was built in 1801, but it was not until thedevelopment of the screw propeller in 1840 for the Great Eastern, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), that the revolution in marinetransport really began. Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) built the first practical steam locomotive in 1804, but only in 1825, with the opening of the Stockton-Darlington railway, did there begin the railroad revolution which very rapidly extended itself across Europe and the emergent USA. It is understandable that the speculative writers of the later 19th century should find the future of transportation one of their most inspiring themes. The revolution was continued with the development of the internal combustion engine, and entered a new phase in 1909, when Henry Ford (1863-1947) set his Model-T production line rolling. By then the firstheavier-than-air flying machines were in operation, as were the first practicable submarines. Everything that has happened since in the world of transportation was within the imaginative sights of the writers of 1909: private motor cars for all; fast aeroplanes to carry passengers and freight; even spaceships (Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY published "The Probing of Space by Means of Jet Devices" in 1903). The man whose literary workstands as the principal imaginative product of this era of revolution is Verne, whose first novel was Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863; trans "WilliamLackland" 1869 US). This was the period that made tourism possible, and Verne remains the archetypal tourist of the literary imagination. He was fascinated by the machines that made far travelling practical, and wrote a memoir of a real voyage on the Great Eastern:"A Floating City" (in coll 1871; trans 1874 UK). The submarine Nautilus is the real protagonist ofTwenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870; trans Lewis Mercier 1872 UK), just as the "aeronef" is of The Clipper of the Clouds (1886; trans 1887; vt Robur the Conqueror 1887 US). Around the World in 80 Days (1873: trans Geo. M. Towle 1874 US) inspired many imitators, literary and actual, butfew of the literary ones had Verne's fascination with means: most of them invented marvellous devices simply to enable the characters to participate in exotic adventure stories whose plots were thoroughly routine - a kind of inventiveness ironically celebrated by such latter-day SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES as Michael MOORCOCK's The Warlord of the Air (1971) and itssequels, and Christopher PRIEST's The Space Machine (1976).Submarines and airships were most often invoked in futuristic fiction as carriers of WEAPONS and other materials of WAR. It quickly became obvious to militaryobservers of the US Civil War in 1861-5 that observation balloons, ironclad ships and railroads would transform the tactics and logistics of warfare. Writers like George GRIFFITH took a particular delight in imagining the kind of battles which might be fought with airships and submarines, greatly assisted by the illustrator and occasional sf writer Fred T. JANE. Other illustrators, most notably Albert ROBIDA, likewisebecame entranced by flying machines. Wells's speculations about the future of transportation technology are mainly concerned with warfare-most spectacularly, the aerial battles in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev vt The Sleeper Awakes 1910) and The War in the Air (1908). In The Shape ofThings to Come (1933) he imagined the rebirth of a world devastated by wars under the aegis of a benevolent "Air Dictatorship", a notion anticipated by Rudyard KIPLING's stories of the Aerial Board of Control, With the Night Mail (1905; 1909 chap US) and "As Easy as ABC" (1912).Kipling's ideas were echoed in Michael ARLEN's Man's Mortality (1933), and the technological charisma of the aeroplane is evident also in Zodiak (trans Eric Sutton 1931 US) by Walther Eidlitz (1892-?). This mystiquecarried over into the early sf PULP MAGAZINES: Hugo GERNSBACK founded AIR WONDER STORIES to deal exclusively with the future of flight. Pulp-sfwriters interested in facilitating devices were soon ready to take extreme liberties. The FASTER-THAN-LIGHT starship had arrived before the end of the 1920s, as had the ultimate in personal transport, the antigravity-belt featured in the BUCK ROGERS stories by Philip Francis NOWLAN. MATTER TRANSMISSION soon became commonplace; and some interplanetary romances ofthe kind pioneered by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS simply ignored the whole issue, tacitly employing the most blatant facilitating device of all: TELEPORTATION. Such methods began to receive more detailed speculativeevaluation in Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Cosmic Express" (1930), but not until Alfred BESTER's Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My DestinationUS) was there a serious attempt to imagine a society which uses teleportation as a routine means of travel.Attempts to imagine the eventual social effects of the transportation revolution soon appeared in the pulps. In David H. KELLER's "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" (1928) a ruling elite of automobilists is overthrown by the underprivileged pedestrians. The social role of the motor car remained a significant theme in sf, with explorations ranging from satirical comedies like Clark Ashton SMITH's "The Great God Awto" (1940), Isaac ASIMOV's "Sally" (1953) andRobert F. YOUNG's "Romance in a 21st Century Used Car Lot" (1960) through blacker comedies like Fritz LEIBER's "X Marks the Pedwalk" (1963) and dourer analyses like Ray BRADBURY's The Pedestrian (1952 FSF; 1964 chap), H. Chandler ELLIOTT's "A Day on Death Highway" (1963) and John JAKES'ssurreal On Wheels (1973) to such extreme quasi-apocalyptic works as Ben ELTON's Gridlock (1991) and the poem Autogeddon (1991) by HeathcoteWilliams (1941-). The car also features as a death-machine in macabre stories of future GAMES AND SPORTS, in such stories as Harlan ELLISON's "Dogfight on 101" (1969; vt "Along the Scenic Route") and the film DEATHRACE 2000 (1975). A classic early exercise in sf realism is Robert A. HEINLEIN's "The Roads Must Roll" (1940), which deals with the commuter chaos resulting from a strike by the engineers who maintain moving roadways. Other notable sf stories attempting to get to grips with the idea of social revolution brought about through transport deploy some kind of matter transmission in a quasi-symbolic fashion; notable stories in this vein include "Ticket to Anywhere" (1952) by Damon KNIGHT and "Granny Won't Knit" (1954) by Theodore STURGEON. Robert SILVERBERG's anthologyThree Trips in Time and Space (anth 1973) contains novellas on the theme: Larry NIVEN's "Flash Crowd", Jack VANCE's "Rumfuddle" and John BRUNNER's "You'll Take the High Road". Niven later continued the theme in 4 further stories, and Brunner developed it in a novel, Web of Everywhere (1974).Early sf about transportation infrastructure is mostly concernedwith tunnels. The Channel Tunnel often features in UK INVASION stories, while a transatlantic tunnel is the subject of Bernhard KELLERMANN's The Tunnel (1913; trans 1915) and the films based on it, Der TUNNEL (1933) andThe TUNNEL (1935). The idea reappears in modern sf in Ray NELSON's "Turn Off the Sky" (1963) and is the theme of Harry HARRISON's ALTERNATE-WORLD satire Tunnel through the Deeps (1972 US; vt A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! 1972 UK). Early stories about artificial ISLANDS in the Atlanticto facilitate the refuelling of aeroplanes, such as Curt SIODMAK's F.P.1 Does Not Reply (trans 1933), filmed as F.P.1 ANTWORTET NICHT (1932), weresoon out of date. The problems of laying railroad tracks on an alien world are featured in "The Railways up on Cannis" (1959) by Colin KAPP.There are numerous sf stories which involve improvised means of transport adapted to exotic situations. Jack VANCE is particularly ingenious in devising such inventions, although they rarely play a major part in his plots. Ice-yachts take centre stage in Moorcock's The Ice Schooner (1969) andAlan Dean FOSTER's Icerigger (1974), and ships which travel on unwatery media are also featured in David LAKE's Walkers on the Sky (1976), Bruce STERLING's Involution Ocean (1977) and Brian P. HERBERT's Sudanna, Sudanna(1985). The strangest vehicles ever devised are perhaps those in Robert Wilfred Franson's The Shadow of the Ship (1983), in which trails through airless "subspace" link primitive planets, and can be used only by starships that are effectively sleds drawn by vast animals; among the largest are the spacefaring CITIES of James BLISH's CITIES IN FLIGHT series (omni 1970) and the much more laborious moving city in Priest's The Inverted World (1974). An abundance of technical detail supports HilbertSCHENCK's memorable account of the circumnavigation of the globe by a steam-powered aeroplane in Steam Bird (1984; title story of coll 1988). In spite of such bold adventures, it cannot really be said that sf has been particularly adept in the invention of new means of transportation that have subsequently proved practicable, aside from a number of devices concerned with space technology - including, of course, space ROCKETS. Arthur C. CLARKE has proved particularly expert in this regard, and thereremain several imaginative devices used in his stories which may one day be actualized, including the lunar transport in A Fall of Moondust (1961) and the spacefaring SOLAR-WIND-powered yachts of "Sunjammer" (1965), the latter developing a notion first put forward in 1921 by Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY. Clarke's THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE (1979) and CharlesSHEFFIELD's The Web Between the Worlds (1979) both deploy "space elevators" connecting the Earth's surface to orbital stations - a wonderful idea whose practical limitations are, alas, mercilessly exposed in Sheffield's own article "How to Build a Beanstalk" (1979).

BS

   See also: COMMUNICATIONS; UNDER THE SEA.