From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:teklabs!zehntel!sytek!menlo70!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!duntemann.wbst
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Title: Fantastic Voyage
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.4701
Posted: Tue Dec  7 17:20:22 1982
Received: Thu Dec  9 19:36:40 1982

There are more worms in the concept of miniaturization than are immediately
obvious, as with most good SF fetishes.  I can think of only one author who
even tried to come to grips with any of them, and that's our old friend
Dr. Asimov.

I read Fantastic Voyage when it was originally serialized in (would you
believe) the Saturday Evening Post early in 1966, and later when the book
hit print.  Here's a couple of points Dr. A. brought to light:

You do not compress space without dilating time.  Time passed much more slowly
for the microsub's passengers than it did for the Real World.  What was one
hour in the Real World was a great many hours in Benes' bloodstream.

Communication with the sub was next to impossible.  Rdaio waves produced
by the sub were actually wavelength-reduced far beyond visible light
into UV.  It was tracked on its journey by radiation
from its nuclear power plant.

You do not simply poke a tube into Benes' lungs to grab more air to breathe;
the air molecules are almost literally big enough for the sub's passengers to
see; in the novel they used an on-board miniaturizer to reduce the size
of the air molucules to compatibility with what was on board.

Asimov never explained why, but his contention was that radioactive material
is not reduceable, so that the atomic pile in the sub's engine was driven by
a speck of nuclear dust which "grew" to the proper size as the sub shrank.

The screenplay played fast and loose with some of these items, but the novel
did its best to jive with physics as we knew them in 1966.  Visually, the
film was stunning for its time; in particular the views of the interior
of the brain, with l;uminous purple impulses racing along spinderweb
neurons, impressed the hell out of 13-year-old me.  I caught the film's
great error, even then:  They didn't take the sub out with them, and
left behind fifty tons of metal and glass atoms to automatically
return to normal size inside Benes' poor head.  Now that's an Excedrin
headache...

(In the book, of course, the micronauts made damned sure the white
blood cell which engulfed the sub followed them out through Benes' tear
ducts, and they "grew" in the miniaturization room with a proper pile of
wreckage behind them.  Asimov always comes through.)

I know of no other work of fiction which dealt so squarely with the problems
of large-scale miniaturization.

--Jeff Duntemann    duntemann.wbst@parc-maxc