The Many Worlds Hypothesis

So in the current edition of SF Signal's Mind Meld we are asked to consider whether FTL travel, space empires, crashing suns and the like are no longer better than the intellectual property of a certain Hollywood franchise or two. I mean, you have that pesky Einstein fellow and his laws. You have all that distance. You have the possibility that we'll drown ourselves, choke ourselves, blow ourselves up, starve ourselves or (insert your favorite apocalyptic scenario HERE) ourselves.

Well, maybe. Maybe we're not good enough or smart enough or tough enough to survive the next (5) (10) (50) (100) (500) (1,000) (take your pick) years. Maybe the universe is working against us when it comes to visiting other stars. So how can we get around that?

First, we can be optimistic. While it is currently pretty popular (or trendy) for science fiction to be more pessimistic than optimistic, I think these things go in cycles. The Cold War led to a lot of science fiction where the world ended in fire. The long slow grinding of the 1970's led to dystopian cyberpunk. The threat of climate change led to a new variation on the nuclear apocalypse. But in between the down cycles we had cycles where science fiction had optimism. It might have been overshadowed by the last down cycle, but they were there. So, let's assume that the human race survives. Where next?

Well, we could build an empire (so to speak) here in the Solar System and "play" in that with our fiction. With eight (nine) planets and countless moons, asteroids and comets, there is plenty of real estate and story possibilities around. Look at the McAndrew stories of the late Charles Sheffield, the Grand Tour series of Ben Bova, the classic book The Planet Strappers by Ramond Z. Gallun (available free at your various sites such as Project Gutenberg or Manybooks), Paul Mc Auley's recent duo of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun or John Varley's classic Eight Worlds books and stories such as The Ophiuchi Hotline and Picnic on Nearside. Mining colonies on Mercury, balloon cities in the atmosphere of Venus, O'Neil colonies around Earth and the Moon, terraformers (or not) on Mars, miners in the Belt, gas miners and robots around Jupiter, surfers of the rings of Saturn...all the way out to the cometary halo, where we can have Freeman Dyson's genetically-altered trees and humans living in bio-suits such as those found in the works of John Varley and Spider Robinson.

Not enough? It should be, but let's make the Big Leap.

Even if we can't do faster-than-light travel, if we can't get around Einstein, or jump via a collapser (Joe Haldeman), or find a stargate (television or numerous books or webcomics) or warp space (television and more)...you could set stories using the slowboats. Both Sheffield and Varley had epic journeys not quite to the next stars. Charles Stross did the same in his Accelerandro stories. Bussard Interstellar Ramjets, multi-generation colony ships, laser-boosted sailships crewed by the Habermen or the Scanners or even downloaded intelligences. Take the era of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey where the speed of communication equals the speed of travel, find a way of extending lifespans through artificial means of playing with Einstein and see what you can come up with. Some can find vast time-and-space spanning success within these limits (see the earlier works of Alastair Reynolds as a fantastic example).

Or...let's play with physics. We can go the classic route. Hurtling worlds. The Galactic Patrol. Superdreadnoughts tearing up the ether. Scintillating lenses and steely-eyed heroes and heroines. I revisit "Doc" Smith, Edmund "World-Wrecker" Hamilton and others every few years. The stories creak, the science is obsolete, but those guys could chew up the scenery, errr, the universe.

Or we can take a more rigid approach. Find a way around Einstein. Keep it consistent. Bring it to the fore, or keep it in the background. How about...different physics (Greg Egan's Clockwork Rocket)? Zones of different physics in the galaxy (Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and its prequel/sequel)? Plain old FTL all the way across (Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, even the cinema of Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica).

The play's the thing. FTL, the Galactic Patrol, galactic empires (rising or falling) and the like are no more or less relevant today than they ever were. It's up to the storyteller, the writer, the screen writer, the director, the game designer to make it something we want to experience.