TRoOB: _FTL, Y'all!_

[jducoeur]

A quick review, having just finished this -- I think it's time to dust off The Review of Obscure Books.

In the Age of Coronavirus, my comics-buying habits have shifted considerably. There aren't a ton of traditional paper comics coming out from the big publishers, but there are scads of interesting Kickstarters. One of the bigger categories is themed anthologies.

FTL, Y'all!: Tales From the Age of the $200 Warp Drive is an anthology of stories that revolve around its title. They aren't a shared universe, mind -- they just share a common premise. Say that a cheap, easy, compact, universal FTL drive was discovered. What would happen?

This isn't entirely science fiction in the traditional sense, because how this drive works is entirely irrelevant, and mostly ignored: don't go into this expecting hard SF of any sort.

What you do get, though, is a wide variety of delightful stories about people. Many examine the sorts of folks who would take the opportunity to build DIY spaceships and get off-planet. (And they have very different theories about who would do that.) Most are little slices of life, ranging from the siblings going in search of the step-father who abandoned the family, to the various scientists in search of alien life, to the couple trying to escape the city for a "purer" existence on an alien world. And then there are the folks who choose to stay home on Earth, and why.

It's all indie creators, most of whom I haven't heard of, but the quality is consistently high: the stories are concise, well-told, and interesting.

It's quite large (nearly 300 pages), and fine bang for the buck. No particular content warnings -- while it's not all sweetness and light, there isn't any particularly gratuitous violence or sex. Worth picking up, if you're looking for some good stories to explore...

Comments

[dsrtao]

For a (two) novel-length exploration: Jerry Oltion, _The Getaway Special_ and sequel _Anywhere But Here_. A mad scientist invents a hyperspace drive that can be built by a competent teenager from Radio Shack parts and works well enough on anything that can be made airtight.

what's hard SF?

[hudebnik]

I'm not sure why that doesn't count as "hard SF" -- didn't John Campbell tell us the essence of SF was how people respond to technological innovations? And that that's far more interesting than the hero saving the day by reversing polarity on the framistan?

Re: what's hard SF?

[jducoeur]

Sure, but "hard SF" actually means something. It's always been (since my childhood, at least) the standard term for science fiction that *is* at least somewhat focused on the actual science and technology, and makes at least a reasonable attempt for that to be grounded in the real world.

I think of Dragon's Egg as the canonical hard-SF book, personally: speculative, and pushing the edges of what is known, but written by a physicist, based on realistic physics, and deeply interested in the implications of that science.

That doesn't mean it doesn't involve people, but it means that the science is *important* to the story. In contrast, the science is *almost entirely irrelevant* to the stories in _FTL, Y'all!_ -- it simply postulates an almost-certainly-impossible concept, and runs with it from there. In that, it shares more DNA with fantasy than with hard SF. Great stuff, but different...

Re: what's hard SF?

[squirrelitude]

Or SF uses technology as a metaphor to talk about our current situation, or our nature as humans or a society.

Ursula K. LeGuin had a fantastic bit about that in the preface to a later edition of The Left Hand of Darkness: http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html

Re: what's hard SF?

[hudebnik]

Thanks for the link. An exquisitely crafted essay by an intelligent, literate person is just the breath of fresh air I needed. I've got a bunch of unread LeGuin around here; that might be good for my mood.

LeGuin says a lot about what fiction is, and a fair amount about what science fiction isn't, but not much about what science fiction is. I think she just has no use for the concept of science fiction except as a marketing category -- it's just fiction as far as she's concerned.

That said, I'm going to claim that she more-or-less agrees with my original point: fiction describes how people might respond if X happened, and "science fiction" restricts X to be something scientific or technological. The degree of "hardness" in the science fiction can be measured by how much attention it pays to X's details, or X's plausibility given the laws of science as we understand them today, or how elegantly minimalist a change to those laws would make X plausible... but I don't think any of those things particularly interests her, which makes her (along with, say, Ray Bradbury) not a "hard SF" writer.

Isaac Asimov perhaps exemplifies the opposite approach: inspired by reading something about science or technology, he makes as tiny as possible a twist to it, follows the logical and scientific consequences as far as possible, and then examines the consequences for people. I'm sure this is the sort of SF writer I would be, if I were one, since I'm much more comfortable with logic and science than with people. But let's face it: Asimov's non-fiction, by and large, is worlds better than his science fiction.

[squirrelitude]

Makes me think of Machine of Death, in which stories were solicited with a prompt about a machine that could infallibly (but often oracularly) predict your cause of death. People went all different directions with it. :-)