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?

[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. :-)