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

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...