The transportation of matter has always been a curate’s egg for the sci-fi writer. Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film The Fly conjured up terrible images of horror when its protagonist found his sub-atomic particles sliced and diced with those of an insect after meddling with the untried technology. But it also featured an awful plot hole: why did the machine split our scientist into a tiny man-fly and a huge fly-man, with both parts of the hybrid suitably scaled to match, if it was just swapping over a few atoms?
David Cronenberg partially solved that conundrum with his excruciatingly icky 1986 remake, in which Jeff Goldblum’s eccentric scientist finds himself fused at a genetic level with a passing housefly and slowly begins to morph into a giant insect. Yet this version also had its issues: given the huge number of tiny non-human organisms living on every person’s body, the poor bloke would have probably ended up as something far more complex than just a hybrid of a man and a fly.
