Wormholes—holes in space connecting two disparate points—are probably the other most common method of FTL travel in SF. When Gregory Benford wrote a prequel to Asimov’s Foundation stories, Foundation’s Fear (1997), he updated the setting by replacing hyperdrive with wormholes. Wormhole endpoints are located at billions of fixed points, allowing any ship to enter them and transit to another endpoint, elsewhere in the galaxy. Another prominent example of wormhole travel is Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: a space odyssey (1968), which climaxes with astronaut David Bowman entering a mysterious black monolith that turns out to be a “star gate”—the entrance to a wormhole crossing the galaxy until it reaches a central location where numerous wormhole endpoints are clustered together. Bowman sees alien spaceships exiting one and entering another, realizing that it is “some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy” (Clarke 211). Because all of the space-warping is done by the star gate, Bowman is able to make the trip in nothing more than a pod from an American non-FTL spaceship.
Not all wormholes are permanent structures, nor do they always require spaceships. The Fourth World comic books (1970–73) of Jack Kirby feature miniature wormholes called “boom tubes” that can be spontaneously generated to allow travel between points on different planets, large enough to carry a few people at a time. Wormholes are closely related to the idea of “folding space” so that two points touch one another temporarily. This is the method of FTL travel used in Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert, where it is so complicated it requires psychic prediction to find a safe path.
The tendency of science fiction to create strange and ultimately nonsensical forms of FTL travel was parodied by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). The series includes travel through hyperspace, which is described as being “rather unpleasantly like being drunk.” When another character asks what is unpleasant about being drunk, he is told, “You ask a glass of water” (53). However, the novel is primarily known for the Infinite Improbability Drive, a device which causes highly improbable things to happen. Since instantaneous travel between galaxies is the most improbable, the Drive is naturally a highly effective means of transport—even if it does have unfortunate side effects like the spontaneous generation of a baby whale miles above a planetary surface.
Not all science fiction uses faster-than-light travel, however. Beyond the traditional “rocket engine,” there’s also the solar sail, which uses the radiation pressure of the sun to move a starship along. Seemingly fanciful and certainly romantic, the solar sail has a solid basis in physics, and has appeared in stories such as “Sail 25” by Jack Vance (1962) and “The Wind from the Sun” by Arthur Clarke (1964), both showcasing travel within the solar system. But slower-than-light travel does not need to restrict stories to a single system, for SF depicts several ways of crossing interstellar space without the use of an FTL drive. Robert Heinlein’s “Universe” (1941) features the Vanguard, a “generation ship” that will take so long to cross interstellar distances that it will be the descendents of the original crew that finally reach their destination. In “Universe,” a mutiny long ago killed all the officers, leaving the ship flying on automatic. Those left aboard the ship have descended into primitive superstition, not even aware that they are actually aboard a spaceship, using the term “the Ship” the way we would use “the Universe.”
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Ekumen novels present another common method of interstellar travel without FTL technology; her novels use near-as-fast-as-light (NAFAL) spaceships that take years to cross interstellar distances. Thanks to relativistic time dilation, however, those years seem like months or even days to those aboard the ships; the consequences of such a journey are depicted in “Semley’s Necklace” (1964). Humanity is still able to maintain an interstellar civilization, the Ekumen, through the use of the ansible, which allows for instantaneous communication. (It is worth pointing out that FTL communication breaks all the same laws of physics as FTL travel, making its use a bit of a cheat.) Some of her novels, such as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995), focus on characters called Mobiles, who travel to other planets as representatives of the Ekumen. The Mobiles know that in doing so, they will never see any of their loved ones ever again—they will have been dead for years by the time their wanderings are over.
The ability of time dilation to “stretch out” the life-span of a traveler compared to a stationary person was exploited by characters in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985). After the conclusion of a war with a dangerous alien species, humanity places the strategic genius who won the war on a spaceship traveling near lightspeed so that when the war begins again in fifty years, he will be available to personally train a new commander to fight the aliens. The sequel, Speaker for the Dead (1986), features the same protagonist as the first novel, three thousand years later but only a decade older, thanks to constant use of near-lightspeed travel. Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974) puts a more negative spin on such an occurrence, as it features a group of soldiers returning from the battlefield decades after they left for war, resulting in profound culture shock.
Spaceships in science fiction come in all shapes and sizes, from practical and realistic ships of exploration like the Discovery in Arthur Clarke’s 2001: a space odyssey to large interstellar passenger cruisers like the living Tree ships of Dan Simmons’s Hyperion (1989). They can be small and utilitarian, as in the Emergency Dispatch Ships of “The Cold Equations” (1954) by Tom Godwin, or so large that they can support entire societies within their interior, as in the mysterious Rama from Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama (1972). They can be small, privately owned vessels like the numerous trading ships that appear in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, or they can be military vessels of war, such as the increasingly powerful battleships that fill E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman novels.
The type of space travel an author uses is often a consideration in stories about space combat. Some FTL drives would seem to be too powerful; if a ship can travel anywhere near instantaneously, how could one military force ever stop another? An attacking force could simply jump to the other side of a defending force and reach its target. The writers of the role-playing game based on the Star Wars films (1977–83) faced this problem when they had to make hard-and-fast rules that corresponded to the exciting-but-unexacting battles seen on screen. The writers solved the problem by picking up on an indication in Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the original film that gravity wells inhibit hyperdrives, making FTL impossible too close to a planet or star. In the Imperial Sourcebook (1989), Greg Gorden introduced “interdiction” ships, which create “artificial” gravity wells to trap enemy vessels.
Other SF stories seem to develop the rules of FTL travel, and follow with space combat that will match. For example, wormholes are used in the Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, beginning with Shards of Honor (1986), where much of the strategy in the series concerns wormholes. If a star system can only be accessed via a wormhole, that makes wormholes valuable strategic points, but they also give defenders large advantages in combat, as attackers must channel all their forces through a narrow point. David Gerrold’s Starhunt (1985) also developed a form of space combat that would be a natural outgrowth of his FTL drive; the faster a ship is moving, the greater the “stress field” it creates when it warps space, and the further away it can be detected from. This results in a situation where as one spaceship sneaks up on another, it must move more and more slowly, until it reaches the range where it is not possible to remain undetected, and then accelerate to maximum, creating a form of space combat similar to submarine warfare.
On the other hand, some authors will devise forms of space travel to achieve a certain effect. David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels, beginning with On Basilisk Station (1993), are supposed to be science fiction versions of the Age of Sail and the Napoleonic War
s, especially their depiction in C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels (1937–62). As a result, Weber devised a version of FTL travel that required ships to use energy sails to travel through hyperspace (far less realistic than Vance and Clarke’s solar sails), giving all of the combat action a nautical feel. Similarly, when writing The Last World War (2003), Dayton Ward wanted to focus on ground combat, and hence used small, ground-level wormholes like Kirby’s boom tubes, eschewing spaceships entirely.
In the 2000s, a subgenre of science fiction emerged known as “mundane SF,” evidenced in anthologies such as Geoff Ryman’s When It Changed and Jetse de Vries’s Shine (both 2010). One of the central tenets of mundane science fiction is that interstellar travel of any sort is fundamentally impossible, and the settings are typically limited to Earth. That such stories require their own subgenre speaks to the ubiquity of space travel in science fiction, to the fact that much science fiction concerns fantastic journeys to other planets.
But the centrality of space travel to science fiction has long been part of its appeal, even apart from the fact that space travel allows a writer to tell stories set on new worlds. As we can see even in James Blish’s “Surface Tension” (1952), where a group of aquatic microbes discovers a whole new realm to explore above the surface of their lake, space travel allows readers to reconceive their place within the universe. In 1929, decades before real space travel had been achieved, author Jack Williamson wrote that “It is the space flier that bears us most often to the world of golden adventure. It is as real an achievement as the locomotive or the airplane. Science discloses a wide universe. When man has found the means to explore it, he has conquered his environment. The space flier is a great achievement even if one is never built. The release of the mind from the earth to which it has been eternally chained has a real spiritual, inspirational value. That is the great gift of science fiction” (25).
Works Cited
Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 1979. New York: Del Rey, 2005. Print.
Asimov, Isaac. “The First Century of Science Fiction.” Introduction. The Best Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century. Eds. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. New York: Knightsbridge, 1981. 9–12. Print.
Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: New American Library, 1968. Print.
Ellik, Ron, and Bill Evans. The Universes of E. E. Smith. Chicago: Advent, 1966. Print.
Landis, Geoffrey A. “The Canonical List of StarDrives.” Atomic Rocketships of the Space Patrol. Winchell D. Chung, Jr., 10 Nov. 2010. Web. 6 Feb. 2011
trho.com/rocket/fasterlight.php#The_Canonical_List_of_StarDrives>.
Prucher, Jeff, ed. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Williamson, Jack. “What Science Fiction Means to Me: Tremendous Contribution to Civilization.” 1929. Thrilling Wonder Stories: Summer 2007. Ed. Winston Engle. Los Angeles: Thrilling Wonder, 2007. 25–6. Print.
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Steven Mollmann is a Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut, where he studies the depiction of science and technology in fiction, focusing on the nineteenth century. He is the co-author of the Star Trek novels A Choice of Catastrophes and Myriad Universes: Shattered Light: The Tears of Eridanus.
STANLEY G. WEINBAUM
(1902–1935)
Despite never finishing college (according to some accounts he was expelled for agreeing to take a test for a friend) Stanley Weinbaum had perhaps the briefest writing career of any major voice in science fiction. He sold his first book (a romance novel) at age thirty-one. His first SF story, the groundbreaking “A Martian Odyssey,” came out the following year. Weinbaum had thirteen SF stories published in the next eighteen months before his death from lung cancer; most of his work was published posthumously.
For contemporary readers, it can be hard to grasp what a stir this story made when it was first published in 1934. While its views of race and society are very much products of its time, its depiction of an alien species intellectually equal to (and possibly superior to) humanity was startlingly new in genre fiction. Just as startling were multiple alien species that weren’t particularly humanlike, and whose thoughts and actions were alien to the human characters. Obvious in retrospect, the story was widely imitated (including by Weinbaum himself, who wrote a sequel before his death).
A MARTIAN ODYSSEY, by Stanley G. Weinbaum
First published in Wonder Stories, July 1934
Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares.
“Air you can breathe!” he exulted. “It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there!” He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the port.
The other three stared at him sympathetically—Putz, the engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the Ares expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the Ares. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth’s, and certainly the first successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts—the months spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.
Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.
“Well,” exploded Harrison abruptly, “are we going to hear what happened? You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don’t get a peep for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!”
“Speel?” queried Leroy perplexedly. “Speel what?”
“He means ‘spiel’,” explained Putz soberly. “It iss to tell.”
Jarvis met Harrison’s amused glance without the shadow of a smile. “That’s right, Karl,” he said in grave agreement with Putz. “Ich spiel es!” He grunted comfortably and began.
“According to orders,” he said, “I watched Karl here take off toward the North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You’ll remember, Cap—we had orders not to land, but just scout about for points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along, riding pretty high—about two thousand feet—for a couple of reasons. First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up dust if you move low.”
“We know all that from Putz,” grunted Harrison. “I wish you’d saved the films, though. They’d have paid the cost of this junket; remember how the public mobbed the first moon pictures?”
“The films are safe,” retorted Jarvis. “Well,” he resumed, “as I said, I buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings haven’t much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and even then I had to use the under-jets.
“So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the under-jets, the seeing wasn’t any too good. I could see enough, though, to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain that we’d been examining the whole week since our landing—same blobby growths and the same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether yo
u heard me.”
“I did!” snapped Harrison.
“A hundred and fifty miles south,” continued Jarvis imperturbably, “the surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right in our guess, then, and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus. If I were right, I ought to hit another grey plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple of hundred miles, and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so I did.”
“Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!” grumbled the captain. “Let’s get to the point.”
“Coming!” remarked Jarvis. “Twenty miles into Thyle—believe it or not—I crossed a canal!”
“Putz photographed a hundred! Let’s hear something new!”
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 165