One Step from Earth

From the dust jacket flaps of the first edition: "It's One Step from Earth - but miles from the competition as Harry Harrison blazes new trails in science fiction with his latest collection of fascinating adventures in matter transmission. Picture the possibilities of a world where any three-dimensional object or living thing could be broken down and transmitted across space to a receiver where it is restored in much the same way television restores images or the telephone transmits sounds. Many science-fiction writers have dealt with the technology of matter transmitters, but few have envisioned a world in which MT is as common as TV, as accessible as telephones, and directly involved in building and destroying new civilizations. Consider, for example, its possible uses and the impact of its presence upon different societies. What would be the effect on man and his institutions if MT became the mass communication-transportation of the future? That is the basic question. From it come the secondary questions. Every facet of life poses a new problem: food and clothes, marriage and business, work and war. Certainly war; the military latches onto every invention no matter how innocuous and uses it to keep the war machine clanking. Positively medicine; look how ships have spread disease and how airplanes could do it even better - then consider the MT plague carriers. Language, social customs, everything will be affected by this new form of transportation. In these extraordinary stories, Harrison builds an MT-oriented universe where even love and death are subject to the vicissitudes of progress. Shrewd, witty, and ingenious, these stories span a time-zone from 1993, when a professional adventurer is transmitted to Mars, to the indeterminate apocalypse when humanity's lease if over and a new intelligence inherits the earth. From a beautiful love machine who marries a god and becomes the madonna of outer space ("Being a wife to God is second in difficulty only to being God") to the MT "Typhoid Mary" that spreads a plague throughout the galaxy, One Step from Earth abounds with aggressive imagination. How will crime and punishment be changed by the advent of MT? Or colonialization? Can man escape the robots of justice? These are just a few of the fast and provocative MT adventures awaiting the traveler who steps into the compelling world of Harry Harrison."