Trying to find a science fiction short story I read years ago in Analog or Asimov (I think). I remember nothing but the vague outlines of the plot… will describe in tweet below. If it rings a bell, can you point me to it?
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Katie, I swear that I've read this, maybe in a science fiction short short anthology compiled by Asimov?
The LLMs didn't know what to make of it, I'm getting answers all over the map. I'll try the searches against with "short story" and see if I get any hits.
Sounds frustratingly familiar! Wracked my brain and did a search of old issues of Asimov, Analog, Clarkesworld, Locus, and stuff on Tor, but to no avail. If you can think of any other story details or general timeframe of the story, please post. I hope you find it!
The gist is in this future there is faster-than-light communication. Two people are sending messages while one is on a rocket. Because of FTL comms, the traveler can learn the future of the one staying home. Messages are censored but traveler sends message in code to save other from car crash.
Not one I'm familiar with. I'll ask around, though. I wrote something similar in college, but it was all scifi mumbo jumbo tachyon relay stations, designed by law to buffer their data so no one would ever know the future, but could still relay instant communications. But, shock, criminals...
sounds an awful lot like the Mike + the Mechanics song "Silent Running," or at least the basis for it. unfortunately the song doesn't seem to be based on any particular story (which is wild to me)
I’d love to hear if you find this. Or, time travel to when my sci-fi WIP comes out—😉In it, I use the relativity of simultaneity, quantum teleportation, & FLC via entangled gravitinos to send the MC to the past & future. Of course, the MC sends her partner a story problem to help explain this! 📖⏱😎
Been a long time since i read the Heinlein juveniles, but i remember something like this in Time For The Stars, which had telepathic twins communicating instantly while one traveled at near lightspeed and the other stayed on earth.
It’s from methuselahs children (sorta). The Howard families are trying to get organized to flee ahead of the government. They have “sensitives” who communicate telepathically. (Unless I’m misremembering and it’s the underground in Revolt in 2100)
It's kind of funny now how much good hard sci-fi included telepathy back in the day. I get it, tho, bc a lot of good science folk did think it might be possible. It's just funny now that we have come to see, no, it's not possible. Like, FTL is probably impossible too, but less so than tele-powers.
Yup. But TBF there was a lot of yet-to-be debunked pseudoscience which made it look like there might me something to this ESP nonsense into the mid-late 20th century. Not that the true believers still aren’t flogging that dead horse.
I’d love to find the story again. It was really good! And I think about it every time I read another story with FTL communication but somehow no paradoxes
I have no leads for you but I have advice about how (I’ve found my) memory works:
Really go looking for it online, typing in everything you can think of. Spend an hour on it. Keep on looking, gently (with music eg) but continuously. Your brain will probably start to spit out a few more details.
I found a story I read when I was 11 this way, using the British Library catalogue in person when you could only search it by being there. Just any word that sounded a bit like anything I thought I maybe remembered the author’s name as. The more you ask your brain for, the more it will find for you.
(It was a story in the anthology Trip Trap by Farrukh Dhondy. All I could remember when I sat down at that terminal was that either the author’s first or last name started with an F and had two rs in. I was amazed when the more I looked, the more came back to me.)
If you can’t get someone to answer here, I could with permission share your request with one of my Mastodon communities - one I administer is a sci-fi fans&writers group.
If it doesn't work out for you here, the New York public library has some resources for finding half forgotten books. The Goodreads group was very helpful (the only reason I log in there now.)
I wonder if it was a McCaffrey story? I don't recognize all of your pieces in a single McCaffrey, but it sounds like ground she might cover similar to one of this series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rowan
Totally different story, but Redshift Rendezvous is a murder mystery on a starship where ftl travel makes the speed of light very slow inside the ship. ie, you can go relativistic by running.
Jack Williamson turned 97 in April 2005. And also had a story in ANALOG that month.
I cannot resist mentioning that in the 1940s he famously wrote stories about space miners exploiting antimatter asteroids, a reasonable astrophysical speculation at the time.
It's been a looong time since I took classes that covered relativity, but this would only cause paradoxes with FTL comms between someone travelling at relativistic speeds and someone not right? FTL comms between two people standing on planets far apart wouldn't be inherently future-predictive right?
Ah, given that the method stated in the synopsis is such a wormhole, this paradox wouldn't apply to FTL communication via extra dimensions in which distances are shorter (my headcanon for Star Wars' hyperspace) 🤔
Was there a relativistic trip back from Centauri A?
Oh, reading it more carefully it does say the ship can travel near lightspeed. Then the paradox is created by communication *during* the relativistic trip itself?
Yeah, mostly. You get paradoxes in FTL comms basically if you can muck with the ends independently. Like, you take a ship away from/back to a planet and the FTL link is now to the planet's past.
You can avoid 'em if the FTL link breaks w/relative motion.
If you liked the premise of that story, I bet the movie "Lola" would be right up your street. I can't stop thinking about it. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt11366674/
Stumbled on this weirdly-specific site and read a ton of summaries because this was bugging me, but I think it might be "Letters of Transit" by Brian Plante published in Analog April 2005. https://www.ittdb.com/2484
Because theading is hard to follow on here I didn’t realize right away who found the answer to the mystery, so I give you this medal for figuring it out!
🎖️
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https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-identification
The LLMs didn't know what to make of it, I'm getting answers all over the map. I'll try the searches against with "short story" and see if I get any hits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fisherman_of_the_Inland_Sea#Another_Story_or_A_Fisherman_of_the_Inland_Sea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days?wprov=sfla1
The Clarke/Baxter novel takes the slow glass idea and removes all of the loveliness.
Neither are the story you are looking for. As you know.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_of_Other_Days
"The science fiction short story you're referring to is "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang."
Which is the wrong answer but kind of interesting:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_and_the_Alchemist%27s_Gate)
It couldn't find one to match your description.
Really go looking for it online, typing in everything you can think of. Spend an hour on it. Keep on looking, gently (with music eg) but continuously. Your brain will probably start to spit out a few more details.
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2017/11/22/finding-book-forgotten-title
I cannot resist mentioning that in the 1940s he famously wrote stories about space miners exploiting antimatter asteroids, a reasonable astrophysical speculation at the time.
Hmmmm. Now to figure out where to find a copy of a 19-year old story in Analog... bc I am still enormously curious!
Was there a relativistic trip back from Centauri A?
You can avoid 'em if the FTL link breaks w/relative motion.
https://www.ittdb.com/2484
Because theading is hard to follow on here I didn’t realize right away who found the answer to the mystery, so I give you this medal for figuring it out!
🎖️
Wow!
cc @maryrobinette.bsky.social