Orson Scott Card's
Ender's Game series uses the ansible as a plot device. ("The official name is Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator," explains
Colonel Graff in
Ender's Game, "but somebody dredged the name
ansible out of an old book somewhere").
[3]
His description of ansible functions in
Xenocide involve a fictional subatomic particle, the
philote, and contradicts not only standard physical theory but the results of empirical
particle accelerator experiments.
In the "Enderverse", the two
quarks inside a
pi meson can be separated by an arbitrary distance while remaining connected by "philotic rays". This is similar in concept to
quantum teleportation due to
entanglement, although even that is not capable of faster-than-light communication. Also, in the real world,
quark confinement prevents one from separating quarks by more than microscopic distances.
