As previously established, three-dimensional maps present increasingly intractable problems for two-dimensional media. SF authors who want to create a coherent map for their setting (even one they never plan to share with their readers) can make the task easier for themselves by using one simple strategy: instead of permitting travel between any two stars, they can restrict travel to a few systems. Authors need only keep track of the connections between systems, not the 3D relationships1 between the stars.
One way to achieve this is by placing limits on the space drive’s useful range. The roleplaying game 2300 AD provides an example: stutterwarp drives generate lethal radiation if used to cross distances longer than 7.7 light years. While 2300 AD did, as explained in my previous article, provide a 3D map of near space, it was more relevant to know what stars (or massive bodies that could discharge the drive) were within 7.7 light years of each other. Similarly, while the venerable SF movie Forbidden Planet focused on a single system and so didn’t need to provide a map, the fact that starships could only hit 16 C2 implies that humans only had routine access to a small, easily charted region of space.
Then there’s the ever-popular “we found these abandoned transit stations” scenario. If humans aren’t the builders of the system, they probably don’t know how to expand it or change it. Because Ancients are notorious for their failure to properly document their networks, humans and other newcomers have to explore to see where the wormholes/tunnels/whatever go. Explorers are like rats wandering through an abandoned subway system. Examples:
- the Tipler Cylinder system in Poul Anderson’s Avatar3;
- the alien network in Glen Cook’s lamentably obscure The Dragon Never Sleeps;
- the interstellar portal system in Simak’s Shakespeare’s Planet;
and many more.
A variation upon this trope is “we punched some buttons and the ancient spaceship took us where it was programmed to go.” The explorers in Andre Norton’s Galactic Derelict, for example, can only travel to the destinations on their appropriated starship’s navigation tapes.
A third, and quite popular, alternative involves natural shortcuts in space time over which the travellers have little control. In novels like Haldeman’s The Forever War, Paul Preuss’ The Gates of Heaven, and Vinge’s The Snow Queen, faster than light travel is dependent on black holes. Systems not adjacent to a black hole system are inaccessible. In settings like Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye, McCollum’s Antares trilogy, and Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, tramlines and jump points exist under specific conditions and provide access to only a handful of nearby systems. The Antares and Vorkosigan books, as well as McIntyre’s Starfarers series, add the extra twist that routes may change over time; systems once accessible may be cut off and systems previously unknown may suddenly become easily reachable, just a jump away. See also: Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy-in-progress.
Bob Shaw’s Nightwalk threw in an interesting twist with non-commutative hyperspace. This means that AB does not equal BA. Finding one’s way to a life-bearing world via a myriad of blind jumps is only half the mission. Getting home to Earth for the first time requires finding the proper sequence of jumps—how many, nobody knows. The short-term solution was to send out a billion robot probes, of which only one found its way to a useful world and back.
Even if the means to bridge vast distances is within explorer control, the cost of artificial wormholes and the time involved in getting one end of the wormhole to potential destinations may force the explorers to choose very carefully between candidate systems. In Lumpkin’s Human Reach series, humans can only reach stars to which their wormhole-equipped probes have been dispatched. In Poul Anderson’s The Enemy Stars, explorers have visited only a minute fraction of the systems in the Milky Way—despite centuries of effort.
Niven’s “All the Bridges Rusting” provides another variation on the theme. As with the Lumpkin and the Anderson, transmission is only possible to systems to which receiver-equipped sublight probes have been sent (at the time of the story, this means only Alpha Centauri). Niven doesn’t even give his characters the benefit of instant teleportation: travel from booth to booth is at the speed of light. Jumping from Sol to Alpha Centauri not only meant losing more than four years in transit, but required an act of faith that the receiver would still be working by the time one got to one’s destination.
Each of these ploys (and perhaps some I haven’t listed—suggestions welcome in the comments) limit the scale of the setting to something humans can understand. They also shape the plots in entertaining ways. Limits are often seen as affronts to creative potential, but when it comes to telling stories (or writing villanelles), they can be useful tools.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Well, four dimensions. Stars move.
[2]Sixteen times time the speed of light is pretty darn fast, but the galaxy is unreasonably large.
[3]Which provides at least one answer for why ancients would bother to provide the younger races with a portal network: it gives the older races control over where the kids roam. No need to yell at people to get off one’s lawn if they cannot even find one’s lawn.
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Gateway is another example of “We found the old transit system” – with the catch that the ships are preprogrammed with destinations that the precursors found useful or interesting – where interesting definitely does not equal safe (over and above the fact that there’s no way to tell how long the trip will be in advance, so you’d better pack all the food you can, and cross your fingers).
Jack Campbell has an interesting twist on the Ancient Transit system – both sides in a conflict discovered a method of building wormhole gates between systems, which escalates the conflict dramatically as well as tying important systems close together.
However it turns out the gate technology was quietly seeded into the war by external parties, and they can track the keys and manipulate ships in transit. Worse yet is the catastrophic destabilisation of a gate, which effectively sterilises star systems, and that can be triggered remotely.
The Starfire setting also has a fairly elaborate set of wormhole transit lines between systems, including one way portals, the exits of which can only be discovered by observing something coming through the other way.
What always bothered me about Frank Herbert’s Dune series: how was interstellar travel managed BEFORE the discovery of the spice on Arrakis? I don’t recall this was ever explained.
@@@@@James Davis Nicoll
Forbidden Planet is one of my favorite movies, but I have never twigged to 16C being their speed limit. Can you elaborate on where this information is found? Is it just extrapolation on Altairs distance from Earth divided by the C57-D’s travel time (1.5828×10^14 km divided by 378 days in hyperspace) or is there a more definitive statement somewhere?
@3:
In Dune itself, it was not explained, but one of the prequels that Brian Hebert and KJA shows the founding of the Navigators, so it must be in there somewhere. I don’t remember what it was, as most of those prequels are imminently forgettable.
@3 Pistachio – IIRC, the implication was that the jumps were done blindly using basic math, and super dangerous. The spice later allowed navigators to look into the future, find the set of events that resulted in a safe arrival at the correct destination and then follow that sequence of events in order to make the safe arrival happen.
It’s been a minute since I have read Dune, but I think it’s fairly well spelled out in Herbert’s original book somewhere, but I cannot point you to the reference offhand.
A variant on the network makes space irrelevant, by making gateways ubiquitous and easy. Your house can be across multiple worlds, with the bedroom on Earth and the living room on Epsilon Eridani — the door between the two rooms is a permanent, minimal-fuss gate and you walk through whenever and as often as you like with no sense that you’ve stepped across light years. You don’t care how it got like that; you’re not a builder.
I’ve only seen it a couple of times (my subconscious is throwing up Iain Banks) but it’s got its own definite feel. The universe is your neighborhood and you ignore what’s outside your loop until the surprising day when the antagonists crack it open or shut it down.
@7 – This sounds familiar. What is it from?
It is just extrapolation on Altair’s distance from Earth divided by the C57-D’s travel time.
I cannot recall the title of the book … oh but I remember the cover art, can I find it that way? Nope. Anyway, FTL had a current so it was possible to zoom along in one direction and not the other. I think it was arranged in a loop so one could get home, the long way round.
In M. K. Wren’s Phoenix Legacy trilogy, travel between Sol and Alpha Centauri seemsto be trivial and yet despite centuries of starflight, humans had limited themselves to those two systems. Partly the reason seems to be that Earthlike worlds are rare but part of that may be because the systems they explored were not exactly likely to have habitable worlds. To quote from an old review of mine:
@7/@8 — Was there one of those somewhere in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion books? I remember reading about it, and it’s a great idea until the transit network fails and you’re stuck in the bathroom unable to travel the light years to the planet that houses the room with the TV.
Have I ever mentioned I just love your footnotes, James?
Not that it came up in play often but because FTL used psionic powers in Universe, and navigators got huge pluses to actually hit the system if it had a decent starbase (which in turn I think was driven by population size), effectively the Universe star map could be divided into a few high population systems between which travel was safe and a lot of low population ones where there was a certain chance the navigator’s brain would melt and their ship explode on a bad roll. This would tend to limit exploration.
@7/@8/@10: Yeah, Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion has the gateways taken to the extreme, with rivers that flow from planet to planet and houses with rooms on many different worlds.
Another advantage to the tramline/fixed jump point system is that it (for the author, anyway) tremendously simplifies interstellar war. You only have to defend one point, often a long way at sublight from your planet, instead of a 360 by 180 sphere (Star Trek, though you can see them coming at least) or, worse yet, every possible point within shooting range of your planet (the BSG jump drive, for example).
@14 Star Wars is a good example of how effectively impossible it would be to defend against a non-transit system type of FTL. The Millenium Falcon escapes in several instances (though the homing beacon in A New Hope was an inspired way around the problem) despite imperial ships “blockading” a planet. In fact, unrestricted hyperdrive is so indefensible that the writers had to give the Falcon repeated hyperdrive problems to keep the tension.
Even more proof of the indefensibility is in The Force Awakens when the Falcon jumps to a planet INSIDE the planetary defense shield.
Given these possibilities, interstellar war in the Star Wars universe should look a lot less like WWII fighter plane dogfights or naval engagements, and a lot more like nuclear war (giant planet-killing guns aside).
John De Chancie’s Skyway books used interstellar truckers. It’s another user of the “abandoned alien artifact” trope.
Weber’s Honor Harrington books use standing gravity waves to funnel interstellar travel through predictable paths.
The James S. A. Corey Expanse novels are one current example of the transit system method.
One notable anti-example would be Peter Watts Freeze-Frame Revolution. In that novel, the characters are aboard a vessel that is doing the stitching of wormholes and the action takes place over millennia as crew move in and out of stasis and working against the supervisory AI (nothing given away here that’s not on the flyleaf).
Though I never quite understood the purpose on the latter as to why they were making gates far past the existence of their own species, but that’s builders for you :D
The Expanse is an extreme example of the tramway system, as all tramlines have one endpoint in the same small volume.
Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet has a mix of both- ships can travel FTL on their own, but it’s comparatively slow. The main characters of the book are the crew of a ship that “punches” wormholes (anchored by beacons constructed at either end) to allow for faster, safer travel by others.
@14 Yes, StarFire is a starship combat game, so it needs a FTL type that makes starship combat possible. So they “borrowed” the FTL from Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote In God’s Eye since it was designed to spec specifically to allow FTL starship combat. Since FTL travel with no starship combat is like chocolate cake with no chocolate.
There are several tried and true techniques popular with science fiction authors to allow combat starships.
@14:
I’m working on a series right now that uses this exact thing. Its relatively easy to defend a fixed jump point, and battles mostly happen in space, at the jump points, away from population centers. Controlling the jump point becomes the end game of most battles.
One of the plot points is that a company has developed technology capable of making microjumps safely, which would allow for easy blockade busting, but the guy running the company has been sitting on the technology. He fears what it would mean for galactic warfare. Once released, he believes it would inevitably become ubiquitous, and once that happened, the way wars are fought would change radically. His fear is that battles would need to be fought planetside, as blockading a system would become too difficult without landing troops.
@7 : Stross’s Glasshouse is another example of the “put a gate anywhere you wish” philosophy.
@9: I think Heinlein’s Starman Jones had an example of noncommutative travel .. but that was more of a hyperspace jump than a transit network. Still, if you got lost, you’d never get home, because each jump depended on exactly where you started.
Starman Jones’ FTL had to do with space being flat beyond solar syatems’ gravity wells and something called congruences that could be calculated. Or so I recall off the top of my head.
@7: I think Harry Harrison’s “One Step From Earth” collection ended up with teleport architecture where you don’t know or care where in the universe any given room actually is. Anyone confirm? Or maybe Larry Niven did it…
Star Wars novels invented “Interdictor Cruisers” which generated artificial gravity to break the hyperspace engines of other passing ships – I have a sense of superlong coils of wire in the engjne, like a transformer, melting down, but that may be wrong. The setting establishes, somehow, that you have to take off to space before you can use hyperdrive. Evidently because of gravity.
In the “Dragonfall 5” children’s series about adventures of the eponymous freight ship, you actually don’t need a ship to travel, you can just teleport between rooms in different star systems. But if for some reason you don’t want to do that (for instance, some objects don’t teleport well), and you’ve heard some stories about Han Solo, you can contract Dragonfall 5 instead.
Dragonfall 5! Now there’s a name I had long forgotten from the past, alongside Nicholas Fisk’s Starstormers and some kind of solar yacht spaceship one. (Which if anyone else can recall I’d appreciate).
Must try and track them down.
@24: Larry Niven had it in his World Out of Time. His protagonist breaks into a dwelling that features different rooms on different continents, as I recall. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Stars My Destination had something similar, though the teleportation system there wasn’t fixed-point-to-point travel.
@13: By the by, Dan Simmons’ Endymion diptych featured a problem (for authors) with using real world places without consulting a map, when he places Epsilon Indi and Epsilon Eridani within a fraction of a light-year of one another, despite being in different constellations, presumably because he read them in a list of the closest stars to Sol with their distances are only a fraction of a light-year different. And I guess he got confused because their names are similar?
Yeah, Hyperion was an extreme example of surface gates. The Morgaine Cycle also had gates, but more monumental ones; you’d put one near your palace, not in a house. Presumably the qhal or pre-qhal builders spread them through the more conventional hyperspace jump drives of the Alliance/Union universe. Those also fucked with time, I think not so much time portals as “relativity OR causality” in a way that jump drives didn’t risk (handwave). In fantasy we have Neverwhere and Door’s family… I think they could connect sealed rooms, making their own doors, but it’s been a while. Back in SF there’s Stargate SG-1, though limited to one operational gate per planet, except when not for plot reasons.
The Mote universe also had changing jump points; wasn’t that a key plot point of either Gripping Hand or Mote itself? Bujold had one wormhole stop working, thus isolating Barrayar, but otherwise the main network changes come from people *discovering* new wormholes and routes, as they’re apparently hard to find.
I remember a DOS-era game called “Tradewars”, in which at game initialization jump points between sectors were generated at random. Some were one way, some were Cul-de-Sacs, and it was usually NOT possible to make a coherent map of which sectors linked to which. Efficiently exploring and charting the spaceways was indispensable to successful play.
There was an ancient (1980) 4x tabletop boardgame called Dark Stars that had a weird FTL method.
The Riin use a STL photon drive. The Gzrel use a STL Bussard Ramjet. The Tassar use a Ram Augmented Rocket.
But the Terrans use a black hole jump. Starship falls into a black hole, instantly appears parsecs away in a white hole. But that’s not the weird part.
Each solar system has one black hole at the edge, leading to a white hole. Oh, and another name for a white hole is “star.” The starships appear in the core of a star, and frantically have to move heat to keep from being incinerated (just like in David Brin’s Sundiver). But that’s still not the weird part.
Every single link is noncommutative. You cannot enter a white hole to travel to a black hole. The entire network is a single chain of stars, and it is strictly one way.
Which means that in a 4X game, you can only get support from prior colonies you establish, your colonies further down the line can send you nothing.
@27: There are several things wormholes do in Bujold’s stories:
1. Most obviously, there’s the collapse of the original route to Barrayar.
2. They can be temporarily rendered impassible by exploding a ship *mid-transit*, which must be an interesting feat because to everyone except pilots jumps appear to be extremely short in duration.
3. The novel device from Komarr was supposed to be able to collapse a wormhole.
And, obviously, wormholes must be able to be formed or there wouldn’t be a network in the first place, especially given they can collapse.
The general impression I got was that wormholes were analogous to something like a major river or ocean strait; something which can vary, including appearing or disappearing entirely, but not with enough rapidity to stop people from using them and relying on them.
Scalzi’s Collapsing Empire is an example of non-communative FTL links as well as, of course, the fundamental plot point of their variability. Fixed-link FTL is super common in games, across a number of genres (even more so than literary fiction or things like movies or television): Wing Commander, Stellaris, Master of Orion, Mass Effect, Eve Online, FTL; they all use it in one form or another.
The HeeChee. I mean.
@3: I think in Herbert’s chronology, people invented the Holtzmann drive first, it required AI-level computers for navigation, people spread out through space that way, then the Butlerian Jihad destroyed all computer technology and the drive became impractical, until it turned out that the psychic properties of spice provided another way to navigate. There may be some other explanation given in the Brian Herbert prequels but I haven’t read those.
@32:
That sounds right, but I wasn’t sure how much of that came from the original books, and how much from Brian Hebert’s additions later.
Gateway and the Heechee technology, until we meet the Heechee (pretty much), are not in the “corridors through space” category but the “press some buttons to select a previous flight plan”, for me. There is overlap, and in “Gateway” the novel there already are established destinations that anyone could drive a ship to, using known coordinates – however, the prize is finding new, valuable destinations. But as far as I recall, travel doesn’t use space highways and a ship can get to any destination… eventually, and fuel permitting.
I don’t recall a hard-science space-sail boat story for or with children, except that Ben and Jake Sisko go on holiday in one on “Star Trek Deep Space Nine” in 1995 (“Explorers”), and I think the spaceship in Larry Niven’s “The Fourth Profession” (1971) is one, with a practical disadvantage. And then there was one, not for children again, where I think the idea was that hyperspace travel was very like sailing, catching currents and/or winds but not the normal solar wind. And not strictly hard science.
ISFDB.ORG apparently has just 8 titles containing the word “sail”, quite a lot more about “sailors”, and… no, hang on: plain search for “Versailles” has results that aren’t in “Advanced Search”. But plain search for “sail” is stated to produce incomplete results (300 of 356).
“Yacht” does not necessarily mean a ship with a sail; I hope you weren’t confused by the word. I think yacht racing is usually with sails.
The problem with realistic crewed ships propelled by solar sails is acceleration is generally low so trip times are rather long.
People, this is not what commutativity means. Commutativity would be if traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago and then from Chicago to New York was the same thing as traveling from Chicago to New York then from Los Angeles to Chicago – which is not just different, it’s not possible.
Please, please, please stop using ‘commutative’ and ‘non-commutative’ in this context. It’s wrong.
What is the right term, “reversible”? I agree commutativity is more like the question of whether travelling a thousand miles north, followed by travelling a thousand miles east takes you to the same place as travelling a thousand miles east followed by travelling thousand miles north. (Not from most places on the surface of the Earth, it doesn’t.)
My favorite off-the-wall limited FTL travel is in The Shadow of the Ship, where waybeasts pull trains along subspace trails.
If every transit has an inverse, then the category induced by all transits is a groupoid. I don’t know if there’s an adjectival form.
If every transit has an immediate, obvious inverse – if you can just retrace your steps, as it were – then the graph of transits is an undirected graph.
So, commutivity is the property of an operator * such that A*B is the same as B*A. Scalar multiplication and addition exhibit this property, whereas subtraction and division do not. Also, matrix multiplication is not commutative.
So if an FTL gateway is one-way, it’s non-commutative. Going from gate A to gate B is not the same as going from gate B to gate A.
Another way to look at it is to say that the operation * is not isomorphic; i.e., the operation A*B cannot be reversed.
And further, if A*B and B*C is the same as A*C, then the operator * is transitive. So if going from gate A to B and then B to C is the same as going from A to C, then gate travel is transitive.
For what that’s worth.
I could so easily have called this “half-vast SF stories.” Oh, well.
If A takes you from x to y and B takes you from y to z, then B*A[1] takes you from x to z – and A*B is undefined. Talking about commutativity here does not make sense. What is at issue here is whether A is guaranteed to have an inverse A’ such that A’*A = (no transition) – and the name of that condition is not ‘commutativity’.
[1] Performing A then performing B is denoted by B*A, not A*B.
@34
Oh I don’t think it was hard science – it would have been a 70s/early 80s work for children so probably treating space as an ocean. Definitely a space yacht with mast and sails, golden, I think the ship name was something like Sunjammer, but that only brings up the AC Clarke one.
I’m fairly sure there were a couple of sequels, but my memory is really hazy, this was some 30+ years ago.
David Drake’s RCN series has the whole Hyperspace with Sailing Ships, but I think he mostly just wants to rewrite Aubrey Maturin IN SPACE.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Mass Effect, and its ancient network of Mass Relays.
There’s also Cowboy Bebop, which has a gate network limited to the various planets, dwarf planets and asteroids of our solar system (plenty vast, in my opinion, for all kinds of space-faring tomfoolery)
@21 That seems to be essentially the starting plot of the webcomic “Schlock mercenary”.
@43: I did. :p
Mass Effect’s kind of a weird beastie (at least in ME1, which is the only one where the writers were paying attention to the setting they were designing IMO), because there’s at least four different kinds of FTL: primary relays, secondary relays, the Ilos Conduit, and ordinary ship-based FTL, which is perfectly adequate for bombing around a local cluster, i.e a Sol -> Alpha Centauri hop. The primary/secondary relay distinction never appears in gameplay, though; as far as that’s concerned, you just teleport from point to point through whatever arbitrary chain of Relays are needed to get you there.
@36: No, no. Commutativity is a binary operation. A * B = B * A. This is exactly what James is talking about. James is saying that, A & B are “locations”, the operation * is “travel between locations”, and A*B is a “trip”, and you’re arguing that * is not commutative because you’ve redefined A as a trip, not a location. An operation doesn’t have to operate on all possible operands (In Real numbers, square root operates on positive values, but not negative ones)..
How about describing a network as either being a directed graph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_graph) or an undirected graph?
@46: Locations are nodes of a graph, possible trips are arcs. The question is whether the arcs are directed or not; ‘commutativity’ is utterly the wrong term for that condition.
And commutativity is not an operator, it is a characteristic of operators.
<i>David Drake’s RCN series has the whole Hyperspace with Sailing Ships, but I think he mostly just wants to rewrite Aubrey Maturin IN SPACE. </i>
Hmm, here’s a series of novels set in what is basically the Nelsonian navy with the serial numbers filed off; the protagonist is a socially awkward young officer riddled with self-doubt who nevertheless achieves fame, fortune and high rank, with the initials “H. H.”
I wonder what it could be ripping off?
Must be Patrick O’Brien. The cat is Preserved Killick.
@@@@@ auspex @@@@@ 46:
Patrick Morris Miller is correct: commutativity is a characteristic of binary operations, which take two elements from a set (real numbers, locations) and return a third element (possibly the same as one of the original two). (So “taking the square root” is not a binary operation.)
The problem is that when you say, “A & B are ‘locations’, the operation * is ‘travel between locations’, and A*B is a ‘trip’”, then what you end up with is this: the result of A * B is B (you have traveled to, and are now at, B), while the result of B * A is A. So A * B is never = B * A, and the operation “travel from the first location to the second location” never commutes.[1] (“Driving from London to Edinburgh” results in you being in Edinburgh; “driving from Edinburgh to London” does not also result in you being in Edinburgh.)
But what James was obviously trying to talk about was the question of whether, if the network permits you to go from A to B, it also automatically permits you to go from B to A, which I think is better handled by talking about graphs. I think the official term for the “free back-and-forth travel” case is a “complete directed graph“; I’m not sure if there is a standard term for “directed graph which isn’t complete”, which is what James meant by “non-commutative hyperspace”.
[1] Well, OK, it commutes in the trivial case of “travel from A to A.”
ajay @@@@@ 49:
As I understand it, David Drake’s RCN series is (quite openly) based on the Aubrey-Maturin novels, and began life as a story in David Weber’s “Honor Harrington” setting — which of course is the one with “a socially awkward young officer riddled with self-doubt who nevertheless achieves fame, fortune and high rank, with the initials ‘H. H.’”
(So David Weber started the “Nelsonian navy with the serial numbers filed off” thing, and David Drake decided to use the same idea, but file the serial numbers off a different Nelsonian navy series…)
(I made the same mistaken assumption when I first saw the comment, partly because I’ve read some Honor Harrington novels, but hadn’t really heard of Drake’s series.)
Now, you could construct the free category on the (possibly directed) graph of your tramline network, and every diagram in that category will be (trivially) commutative – but this is a different (albeit subtly related) meaning of the word ‘commutative’.
7: Another example of a house-on-many-worlds is one of Roger Zelazny’s lesser novels, Today We Choose Faces (1973). All of humanity live in a House divided into Wings, each an a different planet, and connected with teleportation Passages.
@42 Are you possibly talking about “Glory”, “Glory’s War” and “Glory’s People” by Alfred Coppel?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1486232.Glory
Not really a children’s book from what I remember of it, but definitely has the “golden sails” bit.
Also in your limited travel arena, the “Pandora’s Star” and “Judas Unchained” duology by Peter F. Hamilton has a great wormhole+massive railways system (at least initially).
@16; In David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, interstellar travel uses a vast database of known distances between different star systems and hyperspace anomalies, known as the “hyper log” to calculate travel times between different points.
Travel to all but the closest star systems takes anywhere from days to weeks, or even months to years for some points.
There are also “wormholes”, natural phenomena that allow instantaneous travel between specific destinations. The protagonist star system has a “junction” allowing travel to one of six destinations, some of which are hundreds of light years apart in “normal” space.
CJ Cherryh’s qhal gates in the Morgaine series surely qualify.
PeterErwin @51 – David Drake’s RCN series has two main protagonists – Daniel Leary, who who is a naval officer headed for high rank, but is the complete opposite of “socially awkward”, and Adele Mundy who could be seen as “socially awkward” (but who isn’t really an “officer”).
I’m not sure that either Drake or Weber started the ““Nelsonian navy with the serial numbers filed off” idea – it’s a good way of writing entertaining Space Opera novels. Of course Patrick O’Brien didn’t write the first Nelsonian Navy novels either.
@12 I recall reading in…a comment about temple dancers?…that when the consequences for failure are sufficiently dire (such as death), a group of professionals springs up to do that dangerous thing. This sounds like a case for White Collar Explorers!
Also, as a technical writer, I am now inclined to write the story where the Alien Wormhole System is sufficiently documented. (Perhaps they do this with an infectious Rosetta Stone; pity if you’re the only person it infected and someone Wants What You Know.)
Simak, “Way Station” one of the most beautiful stories he wrote.
Michael @@@@@ 61:
David Weber’s Honor Harrington is the “socially awkward young officer riddled with self-doubt who nevertheless achieves fame, fortune and high rank, with the initials ‘H. H.” that ajay and I were referring to. She and her setting (the “Honorverse”, whose first novel appeared in 1992) are, of course, based on CS Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels (written 1937-1967).
David Drake’s RCN series began a few years later (partly from a story Drake wrote for an anthology of stories in Weber’s setting); he is very clear that his inspiration was Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin in Patrick O’Brian’s novels (written 1969-1999).
“Entertaining Space Opera” novels are not original to Weber, of course, but the the technology in his books (at least the early ones) is carefully set up to make space combat resemble late 18th/early 19th Century naval combat to an unusual (even ridiculous) degree. The political setting is carefully tuned as well, down to having thuddingly obvious analogs of late 18th Century British and French political figures (“Rob S. Pierre” being the one that sticks in my mind).
How about trains to bring the galaxy together? Timoth Zahn’s Quadrail series is a little silly but bringing back some of the limitations of trains makes for fun storytime.
I’m surprised no-one has mentioned the SG1 stargate system, or the Stargate Universe Ship as examples of Ancient technology. Then there is the Slipspace transport in the Halo universe,
Niven also looks into the results should a faster version of Hyperdrive be found. “At the Core” uses a new hyperdrive that goes so much faster. Mind you he has cheats like a “Hyperwave” that is effectively an instantaneous radio/video conference
Niven “All the Bridges Rusting”
[Corrupt] Online text, https://www.scribd.com/document/100964399/Larry-Niven-All-the-Bridges-Rusting-v1-0-Italics
First pub 1973, Vertex. Reprints: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?63026
I must have read this, but the first para or 2 aren’t familiar….
Maybe not: “There had been displacement booths in 2004: the network of passenger teleportation had already replaced other forms of transportation over most of the world.… ” Heh. We’re running late, here in 2019!
And I don’t remember Bob Shaw’s Nightwalk either…
“…threw in an interesting twist with non-commutative hyperspace.”
@37/David Shallcross – the Shadow of the Ship sounds intriguing. Who’s the author? I haven’t been able to find it.
@63/steveastrouk – seconded Simak’s Waystation. I love the way the local Man of God is not the stereotypical Fire and Brimestone small town preacher, but one who sincerely believes his god is lovin and forgiving, so waves away the suggestion that the atheist is going to Hell because the atheist is a good man (who incidentally knows the Bible better than he does) and his god wouldn’t consign such a man to hell for doubting in him.
I also like the way the aliens don’t understand the protagonists interest in wood (or the carvings he makes using wood) but bring him chunks of it anyway because they’re nice people. :)
This article (and the comments) reminded me of this meme that crops up occasionally. Never been able to track down the source:
“Sci-fi fan: so, how do your spaceships get places?
Star Trek fan: Matter and anti-matter are mutually annihilated in a fusion reaction that warps space-time sufficiently to drive the ship faster than light.
Star Wars fan: Hyperdrives use hypermatter particles to hurl a ship into hyperspace, allowing it to take advantage of wrinkles in the fabric of realspace to reduce journey times significantly.
Warhammer 40,000 fan: they go through hell.”
@70, Good one!
In the vein of Ancient Transport Networks, read a short story years ago about an engineer called in by some xeno-archaeologists. They’d located an ancient city on a world that had suffered severe climate change, and needed the engineer to devise a way of getting through the permanent metal-shredding dust storms that now covered the planet, as there had to be more cities, and the dust storms conveniently made orbital surveys impossible.
The engineer discovered the harp-shaped structures that were the only thing to survive the dust-storms were power generators, and once he’d powered the Xeno-tech up, he further discovered the ancients global subway system, then got *that* working, and declared his work was done. The head archaeologist whinged that he hadn’t solved the problem of travelling on the surface, to which the engineer pointed out they needed a way to identify and reach places of archeological interest, and he’d provided a way doing both, just not in the way the archeologists has thought he would.
And that ties back to the idea of the Ancient’s Galactic Transit Network. It basically takes you to areas of interest (with the caveats of “at least to the Ancients” and “but potentially not all places of interests”), so skips all the boring gubbins.
Contrast with settings like Star Trek, which add world-building details like recording in the log “… while on a routine survey mission…” inferring they’ve done hundreds of these without incident, and we only get episodes when something interesting happens.
@66: I mentioned SG1 in comment 27.
Someone brought up Schlock Mercenary; it goes from “we don’t need a real astronomical map, because the wormgate network is what matters”[1] to “we don’t need a map at all, because ships can just ‘teraport’ anywhere in the galaxy”. You would need a catalog of stars and coordinates but for story purposes all stars are adjacent.
[1] Though since the network was expanded via STL ship, presumably there was in fact some correlation with real astrography. Bujold’s natural wormhole network could be spanning multiple galaxies for all we know.
With the additional clause “at the time the network was built.” Sucks to step through the gate to discover that in the billion years since the other end was built, the star of the planet the gate connects to went red giant….
@74/James Davis Nicoll – fair point. :)
And that brings us right back ’round to Pohl’s Gateway.
How would you describe the travel in The OA on Netflix through the Rose Window? Would that be a surface gate?
I have not seen the OA. Perhaps because I was confusing it with the OC.