Teleport Me: "Adjacent Fields" by Charles Barouch is brilliant! Rave Review by Keangaroo
Charles Barouch hurls the reader headlong into the fire of ethereal physics with his novel “Adjacent Fields,” and if the science doesn’t scare us, the politics will. How does the inventor of a teleportation device get the funding to produce and market such a revolutionary product? What if customers can’t use the teleporter until their governments figure out how to regulate and tax the device?
--Carol Kean, Perihelion Science Fiction
Adjacent Fields by Charles Barouch
Years ago for Perihelion Science Fiction,
I reviewed "Adjacent Fields" by Charles Barouch. At the time, real-life scientists claimed they had teleported a small object -- You can imagine it: "A thumb tack today, tomorrow, the world"--or a human. I have hunted for these science projects in which teleportation occurred. Call me a skeptic. Meanwhile, "If you can imagine it, it could happen--and likely will" (or already did). Carol runs away screaming
"Tangle of Brilliance" by Charles Barouch in Perihelion Science Fiction
Tiago the Pawn--Interrogative Book #5
My Perihelion review was not permalinked, but I saved a copy in Word. Here it is (rights have reverted to me.)
Quantum entanglement. Teleportation.
Book covers rarely scare off readers with such heady terms, and even science fiction writers tend to embrace easier subjects, such as a post-apocalyptic planet Earth. Charles Barouch hurls the reader headlong into the fire of ethereal physics with his novel “Adjacent Fields,” and if the science doesn’t scare us, the politics will. How does the inventor of a teleportation device get the funding to produce and market such a revolutionary product? What if customers can’t use the teleporter until their governments figure out how to regulate and tax the device?
"When you invent something,” the hero reminds us, “no one leaps out of the shadows and presents you with a comprehensive statistical analysis."
The novel opens with “the little man” named Rama demonstrating his amazing invention, the Adjacent Field, at a conference of potential investors. "There was interest in their eyes, but also impatience...these people went to demonstrations for a living. Keeping their attention was vital to getting their money."
They witness cargo vanishing from one pad and reappearing on another, but don't even grasp what they have seen. "What commercial value do you see in moving small objects tiny distances between platforms?" asks one unimpressed investor.
Rama’s audiences cannot grasp the technology or see its potential--until a reporter in Rio swaps microphones with someone in New York, then Hong Kong. The unplanned microphone swap is “graspable." Within a week, the inventors have a privately traded company with six hundred stockholders. Not long after that, our protagonists are in jail on suspicion of finding a way to trade goods without paying taxes. Barouch narrates these ironies with dry, understated humor.
The political machinations of the story are scary, but so is the science. Teleportation would involve dematerializing an object at one point, sending the object's precise atomic configuration to another location, and reconstructing it there. Time and space would be eliminated from travel. We’d be transported to any location instantly, without crossing a physical distance. Charles Barouch apparently grasps the concept of quantum entanglement, but he mercifully simplifies explanations of how it works. E.g., "Both ultraviolet and infrared do pass through but the bulk of the visible spectrum won't. Radio frequencies pass through, except for short-wave and a few kilohertz worth of bandwidth in the middle of the FM range."
The “Adjacent Fields” of the title got their start in a monastery,
in the floor tiles, into which one monk has disappeared, another one is trapped, and a third one is disassembled, his various body parts appearing from time to time in one tile or another, even waving or speaking. This is not a book for impressionable readers to consume at bedtime.
The story bounces from the monastery to the inventors, to the businessmen and politicians, with a huge cast of characters that include semi-teleported monks, a Zen-seeking pianist, an escaped mental patient, a con artist with multiple identities, and a gay man whose lover fears Walter isn’t really gay but just unable to relate to women, due to an incident with his sister Jenny, now deceased, but the invention is named for her: the Adjacent Fields become JCI, JennyPads International.
The dialogue is memorable, even if the characters are hard to keep up with. Rama tells Walter, "I needed someone more trustworthy than I am. Don't ever completely trust me, Walter. Simply trust everyone else less."
Barra tells Russell,
"Quantum Physicists are idiots. Their theories are the worst kind of junk science and their beliefs are more like a crackpot religion than like any reasonable attempt at understanding.”
Russell’s unspoken response is priceless:
“He'd studied physics and built his device on these principles. He knew it was right because he had a quantum entanglement device under his robes and it worked. She had to be wrong.”
Barra verbally shreds Russell:
"If you intend to kill everyone who understands how the field works,” she says, “you can cross suicide off your to-do list."
Is that a great line, or what?
Aside from the risk of jail or execution for those who can create the JennyPads, there’s the disturbing knowledge of how many ways they can be used. Presented first as a way to ship packages to Brazil at the speed of an email, the invention may be used to save lives or commit murder. “A doctor could reach inside a human body and work on a person without cutting them open,” planes could drop JennyPads instead of bombs, making the invention the “Healer, killer, remaker of society."
The risk of spoilers prevents me from saying more. Try the book for yourself. It's brilliant.
Barouch is a writer and journalist, published by International Spectrum, Mphasis (a Mensa publication), and HDWP Books.
“The reason we created HDWPbooks,” he writes, “has everything to do with how hard it is for good stories to get out there. To be clear: most publishers genuinely want to help good authors tell good stories. We--the publishing industry--want to help you tell your story. That puts us all on the same page.”
About Charles Barouch
Grounded in the real world, I write fiction. There is something about reading about people who see farther, sense more, and encounter more, which attracts me. I want to share that 'the world is bigger' wonder with all of you.
You can find a full list of my in-print writing here:
NOTE: I reviewed this novel for Perihelion Science Fiction in 2013, followed by a review of Book One in a series starring Tiago. Sam Bellotto published a short story, "Tangle of Brilliance" by Charles Barouch. I love this author's imagination and erudition, so I started following on Twitter and Facebook, of course! Amazon punishes reviewers for "friending" an author they discover and love, and now all my Amazon reviews have been flushed, permanently, for "violating' the Friends and Family policy. It makes no sense to me. But Goodreads has not punished me "friending" an author whose work I love. Thank you, Goodreads! I wish I had copied more of my Amazon reviews over to this site before they were flushed into cyberspace and lost.
Charles Barouch is a writer, game designer, and computer technologist. His science fiction novel, “Adjacent Fields,” can be found on his Bookmarks website along with an index of his other stories, technical writing, and blogs.
What made me think of this author today? @fitinfun and @felt.buzz did when she nominated his story for the weekly Freewrite Favorites:
@felt.buzz writing for the "portal" prompt. I was the freewritehouse reminder for his prior work and suggested he continue the story with this prompt. This creepy tale is the result of that idea. Such a nice guy for such chilling thoughts! Read it here:
