FTL = Faster etc.
Three Kinds Of Future Histories
(i) STL only.
(ii) STL, then FTL.
(iii) early FTL.
(i) Poul Anderson's:
Tales Of The Flying Mountains
Kith History
Rustum History
The Boat Of A Million Years
Tau Zero
Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy
Genesis
Larry Niven's A World Out Of Time
(ii) Robert Heinlein's Future History
Larry Niven's Known Space History
Anderson's Psychotechnic History
(iii) Anderson's Technic History
Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium History
In (i), the premise is not just that no means of FTL is ever discovered but that FTL remains theoretically impossible. The sudden invention of an FTL drive at the end of Tau Zero or Starfarers would be almost as unacceptable a deus ex machina as the sudden arrival of an alien spacecraft at the end of a mainstream novel.
Anderson's There Will Be Time is ambiguous. The main characters are mutant time travelers and:
"'Physicists talk about a mathematical equivalence between traveling into the past and flying faster than light.'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), XVI, p. 174.
- so maybe FTL will be developed but, if not, then time travelers will travel futureward to extra-solar planets in subjective minutes or hours within STL ships whose interstellar journeys last for objective centuries. These possibilities imply two alternative sequels to There Will Be Time. Another two possibilities are suggested when Leonce says:
"'Maybe we'll find a New Earth to raise [children] on... Or maybe we'll wander the universe till we die.'" (p. 175)
We want to read all these unwritten narratives.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I would argue that "The Saturn Game," chronologically the earliest of the Technic stories, shows us human beings shows us using, de facto, technology within the Solar System that could have been used for reaching the stars STL. Fortunately, the invention of the hyperdrive, around or soon after AD 2100, made that unnecessary.
And I hope real world analogs of the hyperdrive, Alderson drive, or the speculative Alcubierre drive will be invented!
Ad astra! Sean
“Always leave them wanting more” is a good maxim for writers too.
There’s another reason for leaving space: you never know what will spark with the audience, who can be quite demanding.
Steven Donaldson once said to me (ruefully) that he’d thought he had millions of Donaldson fans, but it turned out he had millions of “Thomas Covenant” fans. Doyle couldn’t get free of Sherlock even by throwing him off a waterfall.
And Patrick O’Brien ran out of Napoleonic War for his Aubrey/Maturin series and had to double up on 1813 and 1814.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I've seen that happening with fans of your Emberverse series! I've seen lamentations by fans who mourn that you ended the series with THE SKY BLUE WOLVES. They wanted you to continue writing in that timeline.
But I am not one of them! I sympathize with your desire to go on to other ideas and themes.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment