A Journey Too Far

A key feature of most advanced civilisations in science fiction, reflecting its importance in our own western civilisation, is the existence of an extensive and rapid transportation network. Not only is this needed to supply food into large urban areas, but also to transport people to and from industrial work spaces, and to spread technical and scientific knowledge through a population. However, a recurring, and perhaps surprising, theme in science fiction is the treatment of transport networks as acts of hubris - the works of a culture that both has the vision to pursue incredible goals, and the bravado to overstretch its technical abilities [1].

Linking Worlds

Amongst the greatest works of Victorian engineering were the boring of the first tunnels beneath the river Thames, and the construction of the first railways. In the following decades, science fiction envisioned the extension of the ever-growing transport network beyond the limitations of shoreline or national boundary. Tunnels beneath the English channel were proposed as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century (although the current channel tunnel was not completed until 1994). However SF was already looking ahead towards a more ambitious target: a tunnel linking old world and new under the Atlantic Ocean.

Transatlantic tunnels were a recurring theme in SF of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. An Express of the Future, a short story exploring the idea of a transatlantic pneumatic tube laid by surface ships, was published by Michel Verne in Strand Magazine in 1895 (mis-attributed to his more famous father Jules). Also amongst the earliest examples, and highly influential, was Der Tunnel (novel, Kellermann, 1913; translated and published in English in 1915). This describes a colossal effort to build a transatlantic tunnel, linking New York with the coasts of France and Spain, by an engineer named Mac Allen, who had already overseen a successful channel tunnel. Initially planned as a 15 year project, the tunnel experiences both physical disasters and financial setbacks, a vast death toll, and disputes between the engineers and workers. After 26 years of arduous construction, the tunnel is completed, but is immediately superseded by air travel, rendering it obsolete even as it opens.

This novel was widely popular and was subsequently filmed twice as The Tunnel (movies, 1915, dir. Wauer; 1935, dir. Elvey [2]). The 1935 version shifts the European terminus to the United Kingdom and presents two key innovations: the radium drill and Adamite steel (both unexplained and science fictional technologies). These make the vast project possible and don’t appear in the original book. Both films also remove the original negative ending, finishing on a scene of triumphant opening. The 1935 film known as Transatlantic Tunnel in the United States, was praised on release by the New York Times, although the reviewer noted that the motivation for building the tunnel was left ambiguous:

An imaginative drama in the best Jules Verne tradition, "Transatlantic Tunnel" forges on through the years with such desperate courage that it enlists the spectator as an ally in the great enterprise.” …

Plainly the photoplay believes that such a tunnel would safeguard the peace of the world forever, but it is not dogmatic about the matter. For example, although a peace-loving American millionaire contributes hugely to the work, the most powerful faction backing the tunnel is an international armaments alliance which is convinced the tunnel will stimulate war. (NYT, 28th October 1935)

An example of where such a tunnel is mentioned in passing, but notable for the scale of its endeavour and its influence on the field, appeared when Hugo Gernsbach described such a tunnel in his “romance of the year 2660”, Ralph 124C 41+ (novel, 1925). This novel imagines a form of magnetic levitation-supported gravity train running through a straight tunnel deep under the ocean bed:

“If the tube were to run straight along the bottom of the ocean the distance between the two points would be from 3600 to 3700 miles due to the curvature of the earth. For this reason the tube was pushed straight through the earth, thereby making the distance only 3470 miles.”

Gernsbach noted one difficulty in particular: “near the middle of the tube; this point is 450 miles nearer the center of the earth and the heat became very marked.” However he describes a combination of liquid air cooling and vacuum insulation as resolving the problem.

Gernsbach’s subatlantic tube is brand new in the novel, but (together with other technologies) is presented mostly for background colour and to emphasise modernity (the story was originally serialised in the magazine Modern Electronics, for an audience likely to appreciate novel gadgets). It does not actually run into any particular difficulties during the novel.

A less optimistic and slightly more fantastical view was taken by Louise Taylor Hanson in Undersea Tube (published in Amazing Stories, November 1929). Here a tunnel had already been built successfully between France and England, and the story focuses on a second, larger pneumatic railway tunnel joining New York and Liverpool. The story's protagonist, Bob, is sincerely advised by an engineer friend not to risk the new tunnel, which has been subject to earth shifts, cracks and increasingly serious leaks.

“What a different man, I mused to myself, from that enthusiastic engineering student that I used to come upon dreaming over his blue-prints. He was considered "half-cracked" in those days when he would enthuse over his undersea railroad, but his animated face was lit with inspiration. Now the light was gone.”

Despite that, fascinated by the new technology and determined not to miss the opportunity, Bob decides to take the trip - only to be aboard when the tunnel fractures, spilling into a vast cavern which houses a city in the process of destruction first by lava and then by the infalling Atlantic. As the sole survivor of the disaster, his account is not believed and he is left with abiding memories of the mystery.

Undersea Tube was reprinted in Amazing in 1961, and this reflects the continuing passion for large projects such as this in the light of technical advances. The idea of a transatlantic tunnel was revisited by TV Century 21 magazine for its spin-off comic from the television series Thunderbirds. Appearing in 1966, written by Alan Fennel and illustrated by Frank Bellamy, the fourth Thunderbirds comic story described the drilling project for a new transatlantic tunnel uncovering a rare ore Brains requires to improve international rescue’s equipment. After explosive sabotage and subsequent flooding, both International Rescue personnel and a team of mining engineers require rescue by the International Rescue team.

A different take on the idea was also explored by Harry Harrison in 1972 in a novel A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (aka Tunnel Through the Deeps). This is a parallel universe novel in which the Moors were not driven from Iberia in the thirteenth century. Amongst many other consequences, technology advances along different lines, giving the world an interestingly steam-punk feel. Most crucially to the story, the American Colonies never parted from the British Empire, and an undersea tunnel is an important symbolic as well as physical link to the heart of the empire. More importantly on a practical level, the project is also intended as a vital boost to the economies on both sides of the Atlantic.

A descendant of Isambard Kingdom Brunel is responsible for designing the tunnel itself, while a descendant of the executed rebel George Washington ends up leading large parts of the project, and altering key aspects of the design. Interestingly, this isn’t a tunnel bored through the rock (although that was Brassey-Brunel’s original intention). Instead, at Washington’s urging, entire sections of tunnel are constructed, towed out to the site and then sunk into position, creating normal rail tunnels buried in shallow trenches on the continental shelves, and linear-motor driven, vacuum tube mag-levs in the depths.

Transition between the two is undertaken at artificial islands constructed as holiday venues and shipping ports on the edge of the shallow continental shelves. A key sequence in the third part of the novel nearly ends in disaster when the mile-long, flexible and extendable, floating bridge [3] intended to span the rift valley west of the Azores is struck by an earthquake and caught in the deep ocean current before it can be safely secured.

In hindsight, a flaw in the premise of all the early transatlantic tunnel stories (but recognised by Harrison) is their understandable failure to anticipate the scientific discipline of plate tectonics. While the threat of earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural disasters was noted for any long tunnel, we now know that the mid-Atlantic ridge marks a point at which the Earth’s crust is spreading, such that these become not just a risk but an inevitability. Over the course of several years, any tunnel would need to not just weather these hazards but also extend in length at an erratic rate averaging around 5 centimetres a year. Plate tectonics was unknown in the 1910s-1930s when several of the early fictions involving transatlantic tunnels were written. It became established as a paradigm between the late 1950s and early 1960s and so was fairly well understood before Harrison wrote his parallel universe tale. As a result his tunnel is designed to flex and extend at key points as it crosses the central rift in the Atlantic depths.

Railroad to Disaster

Of course, transatlantic tunnels aren’t the only kind prone to disaster in fiction. SF has provided other examples of alarmingly overambitious mass transit networks.

Another tunnel, although one still more ambitious in both scale and devastating in effect, was described by Cixin Liu in his short story Cannonball (which appeared in English translation in the anthology The Wandering Earth, 2017). This tunnel links mainland China with Antarctica and was intended to allow both resource exploitation and settlement. Instead it leads to environmental and economic disaster, and has been subject to disastrous accidents and sabotage. The story is told from the point of view of a man revived from cryogenic suspension, who learns that his long-since-grown son is vilified for the catastrophic effects of his tunnel. In common with much of Liu’s writing, the story is primarily a discourse on family responsibilities, the hubris of state-run, mega-engineering projects and the risks associated with blind obedience to a great plan, although it does end with a more optimistic potential use for the excavation.

Staying with tunnels, this time of the more urban, human-scale we find an underground railway in trouble in A Subway Named Mobius by Armin Joseph Deutsch (short story, first appearing in Astounding, Dec 1950). In this story, the Boston metro system reaches such a degree of geometric complexity that it begins to transcend the rules of normal 3D Euclidean geometry. This becomes clear when, after a new link line is connected, an entire subway train vanishes off the network entirely!

This proves something of a challenge for a helpful mathematician to explain to the
system operators:

"Mr Whyte, the System is a network of amazing topological complexity. It was already complex before the Boylston shuttle was installed, and of a high order of connectivity. But this shuttle makes the network absolutely unique. I don't fully understand it, but the situation seems to be something like this: the shuttle has made the connectivity of the whole System of an order so high that I don't know how to calculate it. I suspect the connectivity has become infinite."

After an amusing diversion into theoretical topology, the train eventually reappears, but the problems for the Metropolitan Transit Authority do not stop there.

Less mathematically complex but no less dangerous is the monorail system seen in the television series Thunderbirds (TV, 1965-66). In the episode “Brink of Disaster”, an entrepreneur building a new fully-automated Pacific Atlantic suspended monorail system attempts to interest first Lady Penelope and then the wealthy Jeff Tracy in investing. Unfortunately the man is desperate enough not only to plan the theft of Lady Penelope’s jewelry but also to skimp on safety precautions for the new rapid transit network. As a result, International Rescue must save some of their own when the monorail car hurtles towards disaster. To be fair, while the inability of the automated system to slow the car safely is indeed a major technical flaw, the actual disaster is caused by a helicopter crash onto the line rather than an intrinsic problem with the monorail design.

The theme of unethical and unsafe experimental transport was picked up again in an episode of the updated animated series Thunderbirds Are Go (TV, 2015-2020). The episodes “Runaway” (2015) and “Hyperspeed” (2017) each take place on a commercial passenger train which goes wrong. In "Runaway", a test run on a magnetic levitation (maglev) train leads to the vehicle being taken over by a rogue AI and turning into a runaway. For some reason this is taking place on the same line as a commercial passenger train journey, forcing International Rescue’s Scott and Brains to board it at high speed to bring it to a halt and prevent a catastrophic collision.

In "Hyperspeed", entrepreneur Tycho Reeves attempts to launch a Hypercar system - essentially a railway carriage which travels through a vacuum tube at very high speeds (described as equivalent to Mach 7 or 8 in atmosphere) between Tokyo and London. When it also begins to accelerate out of control, with prize-winner passengers aboard - International Rescue needs not only to catch it, but also get ahead of it and figure out how to slow it down without vaporising when it reenters the atmosphere.

Thinking outside the tube

While mass transit systems have often been associated with tunnels and railway-type carriages, science fiction has also explored alternatives.

Moving walkways (aka travellators or slidewalks) as a mechanism for transport of people and goods appeared early in science fiction. H G Wells explored this concept in When the Sleeper Wakes (novel, 1899, revised 1910). His protagonist wakes in the distant future to find a range of fantastic scientific innovations. Amongst these is a 300 foot wide moving road, consisting of strips, each moving slightly faster than its neighbour, so that users can accelerate gradually from walking pace to express train speeds simply by stepping across the roadway. Facilities include seats and kiosks, occupied by “an innumerable and wonderfully diversified multitude of people”.

This would have been a straightforward and logical projection for Wells. Moving roads had been demonstrated at the 1893 Chicago and 1900 Paris Expositions, and were already demonstrably plausible, although the practical application to large distances and high speeds remained out of reach.

A vastly expanded and more complex version of this transport system takes centre stage in The Roads Must Roll (short story, 1940) by Robert Heinlein (which was also adapted as radio dramas in anthology series Dimension X and X-Minus-One in 1950 and 1956). This describes an America in which major cities are linked by vast moving roadways, with strips stepping up from five miles an hour to 100 miles an hour, and businesses including restaurants on the fastest strips. The story focuses on an attempt to sabotage the network, as a result of an industrial dispute, the engineers fighting to combat that sabotage, and the vast economic, welfare (e.g. food supply) and social impacts a stoppage of the roads would have.

The narrative suggested that cities would begin to choke in their own traffic by the mid-twentieth century, and petroleum would be declared a military and limited resource by 1947 - predictions the real world escaped, but which would have appeared logical at the time. Heinlein was certainly aware of the antecedents of his road and quotes Wells in the story text itself: “In 1900 Herbert George Wells pointed out that the saturation point in the size of a city might be mathematically predicted in terms of its transportation facilities.”

The concept of moving walkways (often in the form of adjacent accelerating strips) became ubiquitous in science fiction, although rarely on a similar vast scale. They appear as short hand for modernity in pulp SF such as Slaves of Mercury (novel, Schachner, Astounding Stories, 1932) and in cartoon series The Jetsons (TV, 1962–3). They feature as urban transport in examples such as Arthur C Clarke’s The City and the Stars (novel, 1956, in which the moving strips are accompanied by artificial gravity fields and can function vertically) and Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel (novel, 1953). Here the entire population has moved into vast enclosed and steel-clad cities. Internal transport within each city is primarily by moving walkway. Competence with the strips is a mark of the urbanite Earth men and something they take pride in:

“He stepped from strip to strip with the ease of a lifetime’s practice. Children learned to “hop the strips” as soon as they learned to walk. Baley scarcely felt the jerk of acceleration as his velocity increased with each step. He was not even aware that he leaned forward against the force. In thirty seconds he had reached the final sixty-mile-an-hour strip and could step aboard the railed and glassed-in moving platform that was the expressway.” (Grafton UK edition, pg 19)

The strips, and more importantly the ability to transverse them rapidly and seamlessly, become important in chases between Baley and the saboteurs he is tracking down later in the book.

Moving walkways are a demonstrated technology, if not on the scale envisaged in SF. Anyone who has transversed airports will be familiar with their use, although they have never made the jump into the streets. By contrast, and stepping further into futuristic technologies, a very different transport network can be found in Dan Simmons’ novel Hyperion (1989) and its sequels. These describe a system of interstellar wormholes known as farcaster gates. Unlike most other wormholes in science fiction, which are vast and require spaceships to traverse them rather than being used for mass transit, farcasters form a widespread and very domestic transport system - literally. Not only are there examples of rivers which run for just a mile or two on each of several different planets before passing through large gates, but it is common for wealthy houses to have gates built into doorways, such that each room of the house is situated on a different planet and can be stepped between simply and without any apparent sensation.

Both the unnecessary complexity of this system and the dependency of the interplanetary society on it are demonstrated in the later books of the series, in which it becomes clear that the gates are being used to parasitise those passing through them, and the entire system is destroyed with only a few seconds warning and with catastrophic effects:

"On most worlds, chaos had earned a new definition. [...]
Father or mother had 'cast off to work as usual, say from Deneb View to Rennaisance V, and instead of arriving home an hour late this evening, would be delayed eleven years - if he or she could find immediate transit on one of the few Hawking drive spinships still travelling the hard way between the worlds. Well-to-do family members listening to Gladstone's speech in their fashionable multiworld residences looked up to stare at each other, separated by only a few meters and open portals between the rooms, blinked, and were separated by light-years and actual years, their rooms now opening onto nothing." (The Fall of Hyperion, chapter 44)

The resulting disruption to communication, supply chains, commerce and infrastructure effectively ends the galaxy-wide civilisation and begins a new dark age in which individual planets must rebuild in virtual isolation.

High Aspirations and Hubris

The science fiction of complex transport networks has shifted and changed form over the years, as the technologies and social structures envisioned to utilise them have evolved. However there are common themes throughout the sub-genre.

One interesting aspect of many of these narratives is the difference in representation between entrepreneurs and engineers. Establishing a transport network from scratch is undoubtedly an expensive business, particularly when major infrastructure such as a transatlantic tunnel is involved. Kellermann’s novel Der Tunnel and its film adaptations make this point explicit, and while one industrialist is shown as a philanthropist sponsoring the transatlantic tunnel in the interests of peace, others are shown as remorselessly driven by money, with little interest in the effects that their financial speculations have on the project or the lives of those involved. This commentary from science fiction writers on the prioritisation of money over lives changes surprisingly little over the years. The investors in examples from Thunderbirds and its spin-offs, for instance, show an equal reluctance to invest in safety precautions and equipment at the cost of increased profits.

By contrast, engineers are shown as more complex figures in many of these scenarios. In many of these scenarios the chief engineer responsible for the transport networks is shown as heroic. The Tunnel’s Mac Allen is a driven visionary, responsible almost single-handedly for the success of his project. Chief Engineer Gaines of The Roads Must Roll masterminds the defeat of his disgruntled employees, showing an understanding of human psychology as well as of the technology of the road. Engineer Dutch Higgins acts as a Cassandraic whistleblower in Undersea Tube. Billionaire inventor Tycho Reeves in Thunderbirds are Go’s "Hyperspeed" is willing to ask for help, open to correction and assists with the solution of his problem. And in every version of Thunderbirds, engineer Brains not only contributes to the immediate solution of problems but is also responsible for the International Rescue vehicles that save lives.

However engineers are also shown as hubristic and detached from human issues. Mac Allen loses his wife and family, as well as being willing to spend hundreds of lives in pursuit of his dreams. He becomes a figure of approbation when the tunnel appears likely to be a failure. Similarly, the engineer Shen Yuan in Liu’s Cannonball becomes a figure of hate for his hubristic project and its consequences. Inventor Tycho Reeves in Thunderbirds Are Go shows arrogance in carrying passengers on his test run, and in his certainty that no one could possibly see any idea that he has missed. In The Roads Must Roll, Gaines (together with Heinlein) demonstrates little interest or sympathy for the reasonable complaints of his workers. And in A Subway Named Mobius, engineers don’t really feature at all as a mathematician and the network managers and customer service administrators try to solve the problem of a complex system (in every sense) without seriously affecting passenger services.

This fiction also reflects an anxiety over automation. The moving walkways of SF may have a large body of engineers behind the scenes, but users of the system are not directed or guided in any way, so that when something goes wrong, there is no one to advise against incautious steps onto a still-moving strip. The Pacific Atlantic monorail of Thunderbirds’ "Brink of Disaster" becomes a runaway at least in part because no one qualified to operate it is aboard, and it is only chance that Brains is present to override the automatic system, while the experimental maglev train in Thunderbirds Are Go’s "Runaway" is explicitly taken over by a rogue software agent, despite the efforts of its driver. Perhaps most seriously, the role of the AI Core (a combine of sentient artificial intelligences) in the design and subsequent collapse of Hyperion’s farcaster network acts as a cautionary tale against deploying technologies beyond human understanding.

The science fiction of overly complex transport networks cautions us against the potential over-dependence of societies on single, and therefore vulnerable to single-point failure, technologies. It highlights both the aspiration of humankind towards ever more interconnected worlds, and the arrogance of assuming such a world can be forged or maintained without sacrifice. That sacrifice may be personal (as in the case of some of the engineers whose personal lives were destroyed by their projects in this fiction), public (as is seen in the construction death-toll and mass-casualty accidents described in many of these stories) or societal (as in the cases where infrastructure, economics or even the rights of the public are infringed).

In the long run, such sacrifices (to a lesser or greater extent) may well prove necessary. As Deutsch’s Subway named Mobius demonstrated, the size and density of modern cities mean that transport networks are becoming ever more complex - in the topological as well as conversational sense. While the parallel network of internet telecommunications may be reducing the amount of business travel required, the transport of goods and of people for leisure continues to link our world. The great power of transport links to connect peoples and promote friendship was celebrated in The Tunnel and continues to be celebrated with every new transport link opened.

Even today a transatlantic tunnel remains an aspiration for many, under discussion by engineers and entrepreneurs, although the financial, engineering and materials science problems remain as large now as they were more than a century ago. However public transport networks have not taken over the roads, or even the intercity routes, to the extent anticipated in the past. The alternative model of private vehicles such as cars, perhaps extending to miniature aircraft or similar vessels, remains strong and advocated for in our capitalist society. Public transport networks nonetheless remain crucial to many cultures, carrying vast amounts of goods traffic as well as passengers - and every so often modern tech entrepreneurs even reinvent the concept of the bus!

We’re unlikely to see megaprojects on the scale of some of those seen in these fictions, or to see conventional roads abandoned to the extent that once seemed likely. This fiction nonetheless highlights the power of transport networks both as central to the world in which we live and as something to aspire to improving.