I’m guessing most people reading this got their first taste of teleportation like I did, via the transporter on some version of Star Trek. Or maybe Doctor Who’s transmat if you’re a bit older and hail from the UK. It wasn’t long after that I stumbled across Alexander Key’s The Case of the Vanishing Boy in my local library. A lucky comic book purchase around the same time introduced me to Nightcrawler of the X-Men (they were trying to escape Murderworld, the assassination amusement park). The Stars My Destination, Rogue Moon, Jumper, Hyperion… Teleportation’s everywhere, isn’t it?
No pun intended.
Teleportation is one of that handful of tropes– like faster than light travel, ray guns, artificial intelligence, and time travel—that’s been with us almost since the beginning of sci-fi and just refuses to die. Whenever it seems like it’s done—that every possible variation’s been used and reused to the point of parody—somebody comes along and finds a way to do something fantastic and new with it that makes us all gasp in amazement. Look at clones. Between Spider-Man and The Island, we all thought clone stories were dead, and now we’re all cheering for Tatiana Maslany every week.
My new book, The Fold, is based—at least in part—on the teleportation trope. More precisely, it’s part of a common subset (subtrope? Is that a real thing? It is now…) of all sci-fi stories: the cautionary tale. I guess with teleportation we could specifically call it the “nasty side effects” trope.
That’s another kind of story that was burned into my brain early on—first with The Fly, years before David Cronenberg remade it. Then there was the transporter accident in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (mocked later in Galaxy Quest) which stuck with more than a few kids (and a few adults). The Bad Place by Dean Koontz shows us side effects of teleportation that go from bothersome to bad to horrible, and even Stephen King showed us some bad things that could happen in his short story “The Jaunt.” The loveable-yet-terrifying Walter Bishop (seriously, where is John Noble’s Emmy award?) on Fringe ripped two universes apart when he built a device that could “retrieve” people from anywhere on Earth.
As a longtime fan of such stories, I was conscious of this history when I first sat down to write The Fold. I knew how many variations on this idea we’d all seen before, and how tricky it’s become to find a cool new angle. I didn’t start writing until I’d found ways of surprising myself with the story I had in mind. Until I had some of those moments all writers treasure, when we think of a reveal or a twist and imagine the reaction it’s going to get from the readers.
Of course, I can’t say too much about The Fold’s reveals and twists without spoiling things for everyone. That’d defeat the whole purpose of having reveals and twists. What I can say, though, is that a lot of the fun (for me, and hopefully for you) is asking you to accept a simple trope (in this case, teleportation) and giving enough of the mechanics behind the technology to make it seem plausible. And then, like a good magician, I can tilt your gaze a little bit to the left so you can see what you’ve really (hopefully) agreed to believe. I mean, that’s what good sci-fi does, right? It shows you 1-2-3- , and just when you’re getting ready to say “4” it tells you this has been the Fibonacci Sequence all along and the next number is 5. It makes logical sense within the story, but it’s not where you thought we were going.
That being said, it’s been a small thrill and a huge relief to see some of the early comments making their way on to Amazon, Goodreads, and other book review sites, the ones that refer to The Fold as “good old-fashioned classic science-fiction done right.” Because those comments mean I’ve succeeded in doing what I set out to do—taking one of our genre’s most familiar tropes, and– like so many SF writers before me—doing something fantastic and new with it that’ll make some of you gasp in amazement.
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Peter Clines has published several pieces of short fiction and countless articles on the film and television industries. He is the author of the Ex-Heroes series and the acclaimed standalone thriller 14. He lives in Southern California. THE FOLD is his latest novel. More information about Peter Clines at his website www.peterclines.com.
