Ansible - Usage

Usage

The name of the device has since been borrowed by authors such as Orson Scott Card, Vernor Vinge, Elizabeth Moon, Jason Jones, L.A. Graf, and Dan Simmons. Similar devices are present in the works of numerous others, such as Frank Herbert and Philip Pullman, who called his a lodestone resonator.

Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer series posited an instantaneous communication device powered by rare, "Black Crystal" from the planet Ballybran. Black Crystals cut from the same mineral deposit could be "tuned" to sympathetically vibrate with each other instantly, even when separated by interstellar distances, allowing instantaneous telephone-like voice and data communication. Similarly, in Gregory Keyes' series The Age of Unreason, "aetherschriebers" use two halves of a single "chime" to communicate, aided by scientific alchemy. The series is set on an alternate 18th-century Earth. While the speed of communication is important, so is the fact that the messages cannot be overheard except by listeners with a piece of the original crystal.

Stephen R. Donaldson, in his Gap cycle, proposed a similar system, Symbiotic Crystalline Resonance Transmission, clearly ansible-type technology, but was very difficult to produce and limited to text messages.

Some hard science fiction stories use small (possibly nano-sized) paired wormholes dedicated to communication by means of a laser which traverses the wormhole. In Robert L. Forward's novel Timemaster, the wormhole is a living organism resembling a fourth-dimensional sea anemone, "stretched" to cover the distance between a spaceship and a satellite on the home planet.

Charles Stross's books Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise make use of "causal channels" which use entangled particles for instantaneous two-way communication. The technique has drawbacks in that the entangled particles are expendable and the use of faster-than-light travel destroys the entanglement, so that one end of the channel must be transported below light speed. This makes them expensive and limits their usefulness somewhat.

In Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels human colonies on distant planets maintain contact with earth and each other via hyperspatial needlecast, a technology which moves information "...so close to instantaneously that scientists are still arguing about the terminology...".

One ansible-like device which predates Le Guin's is the Dirac communicator in James Blish's 1954 short story "Beep". As the title implies, any active device received the sum of all transmitted messages in universal space-time, in a single pulse, so that demultiplexing yielded information about the past, present, and future.

In the story With Folded Hands (1947), by Jack Williamson, instant communication and power transfer through interstellar space is possible with something referred to as "rhodomagnetic waves".

Isaac Asimov solved the same communication problem with the hyper-wave relay in the Foundation series.

Le Guin's ansible was said to communicate "instantaneously", but other authors have adopted the name for devices only capable of finite-speed communication, although still faster than light.

The subspace radio, best known today from Star Trek and named for the method used in the series for achieving faster-than-light travel, was the most commonly used name for such a faster-than-light communicator in the science fiction of the 1930s to the 1950s.

In all the Stargate television series, characters are able to communicate instantaneously over long distances by transferring their consciousness into another person or being anywhere in the universe using "Ancient communication stones". It is not known how these stones operate, but the technology explained in the show usually revolves around wormholes for instant teleportation, faster-than-light, space-warping travel, and sometimes around quantum multiverses.

Jonathan Rosenberg, author/artist of the humorous science fiction webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse, references an ansible powered by a quantum-entangled ferret in the 2012-Jun-25 edition of the comic.