Laury's Favorite Review

C. Davis

5.0 out of 5 stars Why I Love Ell Donsaii

April 8, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
I have come to the conclusion that the answer to the question, the cause of my affection, is the mind of the author. He made a character that is smarter than smart and quicker than quick, stunning, kind, generous, creative and dangerous. What's not to like?

But that isn't ultimately the reason.

Science fiction and fantasy as genres permit an author to suspend some rules of man or nature and substitute ones more to his or her fancy. There are no limits that I can think of that say this far and no farther. But with this license comes a concomitant responsibility that must be fulfilled if the work is to have merit. The author must draw out the consequences of his/her hypotheses in ways that are both fascinating and credible.

There are three basic elements to the game in the Donsaii novels. First, Ell has spectacular skills – greater than any other human, but still human. She is quick and strong and spectacularly coordinated, but bullets don't bounce off her and she doesn't leap tall buildings in a single bound. She is also stunningly beautiful, perky, humble, generous, patriotic, honorable, and tricky. She is also courageous, brilliant, kind, and doesn't take well to being bullied. Let me add a great manager, a can-do problem solver, self-reliant, creative, bold, and clumsy with boys. I could go on. That makes for story lines that are fun.

The second element is the idea of a technology that makes high bandwidth instant communication possible over any distance, through any obstacle, unhackable and private.

The third element, related to the second, is the idea of a technology that permits the instantaneous, though limited, transport of material, of stuff, through gates. Stick a stick into a gate here and it pops out of the matched gate over there. How far away? As far as you want, although you do have to move the receiving gate to your target by some means.

These two bits of science magic are simple and easy to understand. They are imagined to derive from quantum entanglement by some hand waving about a 5th dimension, but that's ok with me. It's how the genre works. Both have a bearing on distance but really they are a step around the limits created by the speed of light which limit the speed at which causality can travel.

What the author does with these ideas is where the good stuff starts to flow. Through the vehicle of Ell's stories he explores the intimate consequences in our lives of c's boundary. To illustrate, I'll mention several examples.

The communications technology makes it possible to use “fly-by-wire” controllers to manipulate objects from a distance. This kind of technology is actually in use today. It makes it possible to keep the human being remote from danger but capable of doing things in dangerous places or circumstances. The drones used by the Air Force, and by Amazon too for that matter, are natural candidates for consideration. But as an examination of space exploration robots makes glaringly obvious the solar system is a big place, big enough that, very soon in terms of that scale, distance causes time lag in communications. That means that humans have limited control over remote events that evolve in real time.

Ell's trick (that gets her a Nobel Prize at age 18 or so) makes these time lags vanish. It means I can look at a picture of Pluto as it is right now - in the intuitive sense of now rather than relativistic simultaneity. And I can control some remote machine right now, in the same sense. So if I can move some combination of sensors and tools to a remote site I can use them there just like I could use them here. From the standpoint of the information flow, of feedback and control, it is as if I am there. And then a little girl asks, “Daddy, in that case why would you want to go there?”

As a man-in-space fan, the set up and the question left me more reflective than I expected. And that is one of the reasons I love the series.

One obvious rejoinder to the little girl is “Because I want to get some of the stuff that is there and bring it here.”

Ell's second trick, portals, solves this need. Portals have two parts, two matched gates. If my controller on Pluto sticks a rock into one gate the rock will appear through the matching gate here, as if there were no distance between the gates.

Once gate operation is accepted by the reader, the author spins out fascinating consequences.

Space flight is transformed into a backyard business. Most of the mass of a space bound package is in the reaction mass, the fuel that provides the force to propel the package, and the control systems to manage that mass. Portals allow the reaction mass to be kept on the ground and sent to the vehicle only when it is needed to burn, so virtually only the payload needs a push. Portal equipped space vehicles can be made in a machine shop, and ride in the back of a station wagon.

In Ell's world, if I want water I can put one gate in a water reservoir and place the other wherever I want to deliver water. If you first think of the place where the water main comes into your house, then you haven't gotten the idea yet. You want to put a gate wherever you want water, wherever you would put a faucet or shower head or toilet. And since you have all this water coming in, you need someplace for it to go, so add portals connecting drains to the sewer plant. You just eliminated all the plumbing in your house, the municipal water system except for the reservoirs, and the sewer system. Plus you don't need a canteen or freeze dried foods on a camping trip. Firemen just need nozzles.

Now think through the electrical power system, gas distribution, grocery deliveries. Apply the liquid distribution system to your car. Gate to the gas tank? Why not directly to the carburetor from a big storage tank somewhere (it doesn't matter where)? But the engine is there to generate power to transmit to the wheels. Why not just have portals that provide just the power (torque) to the wheels directly? Now the car has no gas tank, is emission free, has no engine or transmission or radiator to move around. But what about the AC? A portal that provides air at a select-able temperature. The same goes for light.

All this still requires infrastructure, but it is very different from what our world has. Both technologies are point to point and not variable. Gates always point to their partners. This creates a star/hub topology on the economy with massive central servicing systems capable of providing custom services, on demand, to billions of customers through trillions of ports.

There is much, much more. Glasses and prostheses and carbon allotropes and aliens and zero-G manufacturing and comets and academic politics and on and on.

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