Quote:
Originally Posted by BenG
I remember Asimov mentioning this. He didn't believe in faster than light travel either, but used it in his stories because it was so convenient.
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I think a lot of SF authors do this.
de Camp was a purist. The informal rule for SF was that you could postulate what you liked for things not yet discovered, but you had to get what we already knew right. By his interpretation, once he decided FTL was in fact not possible, he had to stop using it in stories.
At this point, FTL travel is "wallpaper" in SF, taken for granted and not explained. In earlier days, SF writers felt compelled to provide
some explanation for how it all worked, even if it was largely hand waving. Brian Aldiss once did a story in which the narrator said "FTL travel? Oh, yes! Had it for decades! I'd be happy to explain how it works, but the printer refuses to typeset the three pages of equations required to
give the explanation, so let's just take my word for it and carry on, shall we?"
More recently, David Brin had fun in his Uplift series. He decided that if there was one way to go FTL, there was more than one, and different galactic species used different methods. The Tandu, for example, have a client species called the Episiarchs. The Episiarchs are bred for Psi powers. Tandu ships travel between the stars when an Episiarch
denies the current location of the ship so strongly that space is warped and the ship reappears elsewhere. The method isn't foolproof, and a Tandu ship occasionally disappears from its present location and
doesn't reappear elsewhere, but the Tandu are willing to accept the risks.
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Dennis