The Terra Ignota sci-fi series by Ada Palmer depicts a future world which is also driven by “slack transportation”.
The mechanism, rather than portals, is a super-cheap global network of autonomous flying cars (I think they’re supposed to run on nuclear engines? The technical details are not really developed).
It’s a pretty interesting series, although it doesn’t explore the practical implications so much as the political/sociological ones (and this is hardly the only thing driving the differences between the present world and the depicted future)
Not least being the military implications. If you have widely available tech that lets you quickly and cheaply accelerate something car-sized to a velocity of Mach Fuck (they’re meant to circle the earth in 4.2 hours, making them 2 or 3 times faster than a rifle bullet), that’s certainly a dual use technology.
Well, the cars are controlled by a centralized system with extremely good security, and the existence of the cars falls almost entirely withing an extended period of global peace and extremely low levels of violence. And when war breaks out in the fourth book they’re taken off the board right at the start, more or less.
(The cars run on embedded fusion engines, so their potential as kinetic weapons is the least dangerous thing about them).
The Terra Ignota sci-fi series by Ada Palmer depicts a future world which is also driven by “slack transportation”. The mechanism, rather than portals, is a super-cheap global network of autonomous flying cars (I think they’re supposed to run on nuclear engines? The technical details are not really developed). It’s a pretty interesting series, although it doesn’t explore the practical implications so much as the political/sociological ones (and this is hardly the only thing driving the differences between the present world and the depicted future)
Not least being the military implications. If you have widely available tech that lets you quickly and cheaply accelerate something car-sized to a velocity of Mach Fuck (they’re meant to circle the earth in 4.2 hours, making them 2 or 3 times faster than a rifle bullet), that’s certainly a dual use technology.
Well, the cars are controlled by a centralized system with extremely good security, and the existence of the cars falls almost entirely withing an extended period of global peace and extremely low levels of violence. And when war breaks out in the fourth book they’re taken off the board right at the start, more or less.
(The cars run on embedded fusion engines, so their potential as kinetic weapons is the least dangerous thing about them).