In a lot of sf, including Poul Anderson's Technic History and CJ Cherryh's
Alliance-Union future history series, it is dangerous for a spaceship to come off the faster-than-light drive too close to a star. Even if this seems intuitively right, it has become a cliche and sf needs to get away from cliches. Need there be interstellar travel? Need it be FTL? I don't know but I am not a writer. I like Anderson's interstellar novels without FTL.
I have only just realized how long and complicated the Alliance-Union series is, incorporating as it does several sub-series that I had thought were independent series. I remain to be drawn into wanting to read it in its entirety. But then it took me quite a while to realize that Poul Anderson is better than one of the best - or however Jerry Pournelle phrased it.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But human beings are short lived and impatient, so I would PREFER for there to be a real FTL drive someday. If people, real or fictional, are to get anywhere reasonably fast and far in our galaxy within their lifespans, STL is simply not good enough.
Not that I can't appreciate well done SF using STL, as we see in Anderson's HARVEST OF STARS books or Larry Niven's pre FTL Known Space SF. I do!
Ad astra! Sean
Also, making the FTL drive stop near stars is very, very, very helpful from a plotting point of view. It makes interstellar travel much more like long-distance ocean travel, whereas if you can do it everywhere, the plot becomes much more complicated.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That I had not known. It SEEMS to make sense to think, as we see in Anderson's Technic stories, for it to be risky for FTL hyperdrive ships to go FTL within or near a planetary gravity well.
Ad astra! Sean
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