This can be anything from Hyperspace in Star Wars, Warp Drive in Star Trek, travel through the Warp in Warhammer 40k or anything else.
I’ve always liked “slow” FTL travel, where going a few light-years still takes a few days or so. I also really like travel through an alternate dimension like in 40k, Event Horizon, Witchspace in Elite Dangerous.
I wanna know your favorite versions, or do you prefer stories that obey the laws of known physics, like the Expanse or Rimworld?
The Infinite Probability Drive from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
It’s the Infinite Improbability Drive though, not Probability, that makes no sense :)
My bad 😥
Ha, good choice. After all these years it’s still among the more creative and fun.
I thought the Expanse did this really well. For starters, most travel is restricted as we currently know it. They have the Epstein drive, but something like that is feasible. In any case, humans are still meat bags that can only accelerate so much.
But then the FTL component requires some otherworldly technology with gating. That leaves the physics mystery to having been built by some smarter species and I think that is perfect for suspension of disbelief.
Most unfortunate name since ISIS in Archer
i see the stargate in expanse, lol.
I wouldn’t say it was my favourite FTL but it has some interesting implications.
The artificial wormholes of The Algebraist by Ian Banks. I can’t say too much if you haven’t already read it, but it’s artificial wormholes that have to be transported sublight.
All the new wormholes are of course lovely and high capacity, but much of the network is still the original tiny little ones first installed. So your military at least uses kilometer long needle ships that can fit through these small points.
Think fitting an aircraft carrier through a Stargate.
I prefer the STL in Card’s Ender’s Game series. They asymptotically approach the speed of light so the passengers only have several weeks pass when travelling to far flung locations but the universe around them experiences a normal passage of time which may be tens of years. This has really big implications on the plots in several stories.
They do have an ansible communications system that does allow instantaneous communication over astronomical distances.
goes Plaid
Hell yes Hitchiker’s haha
It’s a Spaceballs reference
I like the kind where they didn’t try to explain it. Trying to show how they make their sausage never works out well. I can suspend disbelief for FTL but not for their stupid explanations
Macguffin it just enough to be maybe plausable, give it enough rules to make it interesting, be consistent and then shut the fuck up about it.
In the Commonwealth Saga it’s trains! It’s portals with hugely demanding power consumption. They mostly have to stay fixed to one place and open. So they run choo choos. Their world is commerce and economics. And trains are a lovely symbol of that.
In The Final Architecture it’s jaunty. Unspace helps you go fast but you are always alone. Crewmates gone. When you come out they reappear. When you inside there is something coming to get you. Something that lives in unspace and doesn’t like that we use it for travel. The terror of its hunting you drives everyone to suicide. So instead they sleep. Magic “you sleep now” pods for everyone.
Except. You can only sleep if you are on a known route. Some rare people can feel out new routes. And they have to say awake. Most shows just follow normal routes. But the special ships with these other folks can go all over the place! At the cost of route terror.
The books are about coming together in the face of adversity cosmic horror. And unspace is a foil to that. You are alone. But we do what we can anyway. Your alone now, but not forever. Unless the monster gets you.
The Commonwealth Saga is so great.
The portals / train system brings the vibes of the commonwealth up to something like the EU, but on a multi-planetary scale. You have to go through specific points to get planet to planet but the infrastructure is so built up that it’s mostly a travel time problem. It becomes an issue later on that the society has gotten kind of hidebound into a gradual expansion so they never really ‘needed’ FTL for exploration, and now they do.
I get US robber baron vibes too.
Fair warning for those who decide to read it, the book doesn’t treat women particularly well. And it’s the best propaganda I’ve read for capitalism. Read it with eyes open and it’s fun. Great villains. Fun world building. It ends well. And trains!
And it’s like a 1000 page long novel split into two books.
And it has some of the most “alien” aliens in any book I’ve read.
I liked the wormholes from the Bobbyverse. You had instantaneous travel across interstellar distances but you had to get there via slower than light speed first. So no matter how technologically advanced you became your interstellar civilisation still grew at a rate of one or two systems per decade.
That series has a good progression too. It starts limited by light speed, then gets FTL communication, and finally FTL travel.
Came here to say this, glad to see Bobiverse getting rep ❤️
Silfen Paths from Judas Unchained. Aliens called Silfen walked from planet to planet directly via actual forest paths. Everything gets wonky time wise when your on one so you might emerge 100 years later. The technology itself is sentient and not maintained. The Silfen who lost interest long ago are asked how they manage the paths. They say they just let them do what they want. At least one path exists to/from Earth. But humans are boring and make things boring, so the aliens avoid Earth.
So if you’re on a walk and you get lost you may be walking to another planet.
I love the Farcaster network of the World Web from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos (for anyone who hasnt read the books, they’re essentially frameless stargates that are always on). Such a cool concept of being able to build a series of them linking the main commercial streets of the biggest cities on different planets together; thus making one gigantic and near endless market across hundreds of worlds… and anyone can just walk from one planet to another across hundreds or thousands of light years.
What I really like about that book series though is that the Farcasters are not the only means of FTL… and that there are sound reasons to use another method over them OR even to oppose your planet getting connected to the Farcaster network. Just seriously good world building.
Fuck!
Turns out my “quantum superposition rifts” where certain spaces (biomes) exist in multiple locations at once allowing seemless passing between worlds, are not as original as i thought.
Well i don’t know how Dan Simmons Explained the science behind it but in effect it would end up very similar.
It was a bit of “handwave-ium” and sentient AI. Here’s the Wiki for the series if you want to compare your concept…
Here’s an article about the Farcasters themselves and here’s the article about the World Web that AI and humanity ran with them.
I was so disappointed with that book, but agreed that was a cool system. The way the one house is described with different rooms on different worlds, and how he gets used to the differing gravity between doorways is incredible.
Oh yeah… the poet’s house was dope as fuck.
I would love a series about an “Interplanetary University” that had its campus setup across several dozen planets using Farcasters. That would be an interesting setting in the Hyperion universe.
Would make for an epic setting for a Sci Fi show like The Magicians.
In the later books, the alternative FTL is wild too. The acceleration is so brutal that on every jump, you will be smashed to a pulp and then spend days being put back together.
“Raspberry Jam Delta V” everyone gets inside “Resurrection Creches”. Which just hold your goo for later reassembly.
Funny thing is that, while a similar principle, they’re safer and more ethical than the Star Trek “suicide booth” transporters.
Oh, but they had those too. Imagine a luxury house linked together by instant transporters, so you go to a platform on an ocean planet to poop.
Event Horizon… it just had a few downsides.
That’s basically 40k.
My headcanon is that it is in the 40k universe
Liberate tu temet ex infernis
Shortcut through hell. Quick adventure - in and out in 20 minutes!
No mention of Futurama? Screw moving the ship, just move the universe around it!
Not ftl but I really like cryo sleep themes. Someone wakes up 100+ years later and the world is post apocalyptic. James axlers deathlands audio books, alien, some obscure video games.
The game Outer Worlds uses this as a main plot device.
A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.
My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven’t played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.
You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.
Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.
Then an aquatic species that doesn’t do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.
And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.
And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don’t have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.
So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.
Early versions of Stellaris had something similar, but reduced in scale- it’s a 4X grand strategy where you’re basically controlling a spacefaring species you create, if you’re not familiar with it.
They did away with multiple FTL systems at some point, but early on in the games lifespan when creating your species you’d pick between hyperdrives, wormholes, or warp iirc.
Hyperdrives were basically Star Wars style space travel- predetermined FTL ‘roads’ in space that you can travel along.
Warp was ‘the ship teleports from where it is to where it’s going’.
Wormhole was the most interesting one to me, because it used giant ‘hubs’ you’d need to build in space to… well, make a wormhole from the hub to wherever the ships were trying to go. The downsides were that you had to build hubs and they were expensive, and you could only actually leave from the hub itself which had a limit on how many wormholes it could make. The upside was that it had dramatically better range than the other FTL options so you could build one on the borders of an enemy and then basically show up wherever you wanted.
I remember hearing about this! Never got a chance to actually play it though.
The concept of different races travelling differently reminds me of David Brin’s Uplift series, though. Everyone uses Hyperspace, but different species use different “bands”, which behave differently. “A-level” behaves somewhat similarly to Hyperspace from other settings, and is preferred by oxygen breathing species. There’s another level that’s used mostly by hydrogen-breathing species, and is inhabited by quantum-order life. The one that sticks out for me is “E-level”, which is mostly used by memetic organisms - you have to shift your self-conception to traverse a changing landscape. It’s… really trippy.
I really love roguelikes and I’m mad that their version is unsupported and basically unplayable right now
edit: The Pit. I want to play that on my steamdeck so badly.
My favourite one is Red Dwarf when they see the future. Requires a fair amount of “dont think about it” but its still a great plot.
