Skizworld

Space science fiction always has hurdles to face in telling a story. The fantasy element of sci-fi is in assuming we figured out a way to do things that are currently out of reach. With interstellar travel it’s always the question of how we can get ourselves to another star in our own lifetime. Currently the answer is: we can’t. Real science has yet to overcome to get living breathing humans to another star before they die of old age and one limiting factor the enormous amounts of energy and fuel required. Often good sci-fi authors know which rules they’re breaking and have an explanation for how they are able to do it. At the very least they can throw in what Brian Brown at the Slice-of-Scifi podcasts (among others) call “plot-tonium.” In other words there’s a magic box technology that works it all out and the author doesn’t bother to explain how it works and maybe even the characters don’t know in the same way the majority of the people that can drive a car couldn’t tell you how a combustion engine works. Put in a heading for Alpha Centauri and on my mark activate the Gerfoofle Drive, and poof, we’re there.

Now, whether or not you know how your characters are getting from one star to the other it is a good idea to get an know how fast they can do it, and stay consistent. You have galactic spanning stories like Star Wars where the space culture conquered the speed of light and relativity limitations and traveling the Galaxy is analogous to traveling anywhere on Earth for us. Then there’s Star Trek where, even though humanity is able to go beyond the speed of light, most of the action takes place in one quarter of the Galaxy and even at their best faster than light sleeps it takes about 70 years to traverse from one quarter of the Galaxy to another.

I think some of the more interesting space sci-fi I’ve read recently takes place in futures where humans can’t break the laws of physics and go faster than light. This limits one kind of story but opens up so many challenging alternatives for our space hero. We can’t really have a Galaxy spanning culture that can interact real-time but what kind of stories can we have? Orson Scott Card tells a story where humanity has worked out how to get close to the speed of light (the ships are called “light huggers”) but there is still the pesky relativity. The problem, as covered in my Fun With Time Dialation post, is that the closer someone gets to the speed of light the slower time moves for them. The main character in the Ender series does so much interstellar travel that in his 30-some years of life he is able to witness thousands of years of human history. Think of the possibilities. What if a trip from San Francisco to New York meant that while you were in the plane for 5 hours, 2 years went by on the ground? Every time you landed on one of your trips you would basically be seeing 2 years into your future. Also a lot can happen in 2 years, perhaps New York won’t be a safe place to land anymore.

Another cool space science fiction series that doesn’t go faster than light are the “Revelation Space” books by Alastair Reynolds. A good example of a very different kind of interstellar story happens in “Chasm City” where part of the book is dedicated to a story about a flotilla of ships that have a top speed of 8% of the speed of light. Now compared to Star Trek and Star Wars, this is a extremely slow crawl. In this sort of story, instead of focusing on several exotic destinations the Author focuses on all the trouble and hardship it takes to get to a single destination. In “Chasm City” the flotilla story is told as history but I find it the most compelling part of the book because it takes the crew of the ship generations to get to their destination and the different ships become like different countries with different cultures. Some readers and viewers of sci-fi have been so spoiled by the galaxy spanning shows/stories that there is often little respect for how vast these distances are. I spoke about 8% of the speed of light as a crawl but it’s actually 23,983.40 Kilometers persecond! At that speed someone could circle the entire equator in 1.67 seconds. Using our handy closest star outside our solar system, proxima centauri it would take our 8% of light speed ship 52.75 years to get there. At these speeds the story about interstellar travelers is not about explorers; it’s about pioneers. They’re doing things for the next generation and that takes a different kind of human. Well in the case of Chasm City they were doing for the next generation and a cargo of frozen people who would be thawed out once they got to the destination.

All these different kinds of stories can be found in sci-fi books but so far I find them very skewed toward the galaxy spanning kind in TV and movies. I think the sci-fi in media that uses space/space ships and alien worlds as merely exotic backdrops to an action story do a disservice to the genre and underestimates the intelligence of the fans. Understanding how far away this stuff is from us is one of the first steps towards a true sense of awe for our universe.