Imaginary Space

Much American sf shares these premises:

(i) that faster than light (FTL) interstellar travel is possible - a tall order;

(ii) that such travel will become easily affordable, at least to some sections of society, and will even become an entirely routine matter like contemporary air travel - a considerably taller order;

(iii) that many uninhabited terrestroid extra-solar planets are humanly colonizable without needing to be terraformed;

(iv) that there are also many inhabited planets;

(v) that human beings will quickly communicate and interact with the inhabitants of such planets;

(vi) thus, that civilization, trade and warfare will, in the next few centuries, occur on an interstellar scale - that contemporary human international relations will simply be continued in future human and non-human interstellar relations.

Does that seem implausible and anthropomorphic to you? There is a non-human universe out there. What is it really like? Premise (iii) has become a lot more plausible in my life-time but I remain sceptical about the rest.

Poul Anderson wrote sf that accepted these premises but also other sf that did not.

Robert Heinlein, James Blish and Poul Anderson thought about these premises, instead of just assuming them, and tried to make FTL believable. Blish's main future history begins with the composite premise that both FTL and antiagathics are necessary for interstellar travel. Heinlein's Future History has the long-lived Howard Families hijacking a generation ship, then a mathematical genius inventing the FTL drive in flight. In Heinlein's Time For The Stars, a slower than light interstellar expedition confirms that telepathy operates instantaneously across interstellar distances, thus providing a theoretical basis for an instantaneous irrelevant drive. The most ingenious FTL drive is Anderson's quantum jump hyperdrive although he also imagined several others. But, in one later story, Blish as author commented on this whole idea by labelling his newest version of an FTL drive the "Imaginary Drive."