Culturalia: The Death Of Teleportation
"I don't need to tell you what teleportation could have done for us ... And we were right there, on the verge of it. But then, earlier this year, it all started to collapse. Ironically, and sadly, magic itself holds much of the blame for this."Summary
A retrospective look at the cascade of teleportation accidents and panics that followed the EventBrogiAccident, and how they transformed a potentially revolutionary application of magic into an unsafe and illegal mess.
Actual Creator
BaxilDragonRelease Date
2003-05-20Word Count
1,975Creator Comments
Another piece of world background that stands well on its own, years after being written.Culturalia Data
Type
- Magazine article
Major Focuses
Characters Cited
- Denny Brogi
- Jeff Sullivan, a mage involved in a subsequent teleportation accident
- Matt Gutierrez, who committed suicide through teleportation
Piece's Author
- Vick Tannigan, a magical supply shop owner and Boston Underground freelancer
Piece's Date
- Oct. 22, 1997
Piece's Setting
- Boston, MA (alternative newsweekly)
Significant Cameos and References
- The EventValdineVerdict and EventGoldMurders are name-dropped, and explained in footnotes.
- GroupLogosDei and GroupRavensHeadTechnologies are two major TTU magitech firms.
- Vick snipes at CharacterDennisRedwing's reaction to the EventBrogiAccident: the person responsible for teleporting thousands of therianthropes to EventTheMeeting did in fact urge his fellow mages to "use teleportation with caution," and was savagely criticized for it by a number of those mages.
Trivia
- One version of Matt's Act, the March 1997 American law explained in one of the story footnotes, also contained an amendment which would have removed the ATPA provisions that CharacterTomValdine was charged under. Unfortunately, that section of the bill was removed during House/Senate negotiations.
- This article is cited in CulturaliaScaryStories as "starting to get some wider attention."
- When this piece of culturalia was first written, a thread on the (late) Tomorrowlands Forums was started to collect "Letters to the Editor"-style responses to Vick's article. Several excellent ones were written and then ultimately lost in the Great Server Crash of 2004. BaxilDragon needs to track them down in the old files on his hard drive and repost them somewhere more permanent.
- While we're waiting for "more permanent", the raw letters at least have been found. (Yay!) -> http://www.tomorrowlands.org/story/teleportation_LTE.txt
Read it at
http://www.tomorrowlands.org/story/teleportation.html
Feedback
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CategoryCulturalia StoriesByBaxilDragon
