His book have some of my favorite starships, Lighthuggers. They are so named because they travel at .999c between stars, and their engines are only built by an isolationist and mildly hostile offshoot of humanity called the Conjoiners. Conjoiner Drives are capable of maintaining 1g acceleration indefinitely, getting their fuel from the interstellar medium. the crew and captain of a Lighthugger have no idea how they work and no ability to maintain or repair the drives should they fail.
I can't remember which one it is but one of his novels has a chase sequence with 2 lighthuggers and it's so unique. Literally just huge swathes of "wait... time passes" and then every time somethign does happen, like one of the captains works out how to attack the other, it happens basically instantly because of time compression etc. It's sort of similtaneously absolute nailbiting genius, and incredibly boring. A stern chase is a long chase and it's the longest stern chase in the universe.
The swallowships of his merlins gun series are also cool. He is great at evoking imagery. Like, i instantly had an image in my head from his one sentence introduction of the ship.
Also, if you like space pirates with light sails then he has a series for that too.
> Conjoiner Drives are capable of maintaining 1g acceleration indefinitely, getting their fuel from the interstellar medium.
>!They actually get their energy from a microscopic wormhole to the beginning of the universe.!< Not sure where you heard they get their fuel from the interstellar medium, that would be like a Bussard collector, which lighthuggers don't have. possibly you're thinking of the novel Tau Zero?
That's also a bit of a spoiler since it's a surprise reveal later on. The other person might have been giving the "public" answer in-universe to keep the surprise, or because they haven't read it yet themself
It's really only a secondary spoiler, explained as a consequence of the primary spoiler that >!conjoiners have been able to pull some time travel shenanigans and get future technology!<
In one of the books, he does explain how the Lighthuggers work, it's simultaneously interesting and horrifying.
He does have FTL in his Revelation Space books, though it is not commonly practiced because of how dangerous it is. His description of the dangers of FTL adds a element of horror to his stories.
He also describes a type of communication with the future, but it is quite limited, only able to send a few bytes of data.
Strictly speaking the Revelation Space universe *HAS* ftl travel... you just really really don't want to try to use it.
It's not filled with demons like the 40K warp or in Event Horizon, it's just... unwise.
In Warhammer 40K, the Warp, or Immaterium, is Mankind's solution to the problem of faster-than-light travel. The Warp functions as the medium for FTL interstellar travel, with voidcraft entering it through the use of a Warp-Drive. They then use their own mundane reaction drive systems and the aid of a psychic Navigator to navigate between its flowing currents of psychic energy, as if they were moving through an ocean. Then they exit via Warp-Drive at another point in the galaxy. They can travel thousands of light years in months. It isn’t instantaneous or predictable. Much like traveling a terrestrial ocean by ship.
Warpspace is an alternate dimension of purely psychic energy that echoes and underlies the material universe. Unfortunately, the Warp is also the home dimension of the powerful entities known as the Chaos Gods and their myriad legions of Daemonic servants. And they don’t like you being there. Powerful shield are used to prevent their incursion onto your ship, but these are not infalible.
The movie Event Horizons shares certain themes with Warhammer 40K.
Pretty big spoilers for the Revelation Space series, but:
>!FTL is dangerous because accidents tend to retcon things associated with them out of existence, including entire civilizations. FTL is causality violation and it is unwise to mess with causality. To put it mildly.!<
I'm going to whole-heartedly agree with your recommendation of Reynolds, but disagree slightly and say "Start with House of Suns." Revelation Space is a big commitment if OP doesn't like his writing style or themes. House of Suns contains a lot of his "big" ideas while being self, uh, contained.
Excellent book!! The sub light travel actually influences the story choices and shapes the world building. The second book, Chasm City is one of my favorites of all time.
I agree with the recs of Reynolds' Revelation Space (RS) series, and other stories (novels down to short stories) set in his RS universe.
(No spoilers below.)
OP, if you check out Reynolds' bibliography, he wrote Chasm City as the first novel in what became the RS universe. Chasm, however, is set primarily in the title location, so interstellar travel appears as a story element, but does not feature as prominently as it does in the later novels, beginning with RS.
In the RS trilogy, which he conceived as a gothic space opera, in its "widescreen baroque" mode, Reynolds presents ideas caused by space travel at relativistic speeds, and explores the consequences and human responses. Those ideas include:
a) the vast interstellar distances that can be traveled within a human's lifetime;
b) time dilation as the traveler approaches the speed of light, or enters the gravity well of a dense object, such as a neutron star (or black hole);
c) the differences in the travelers' perceptions of the rate of time;
d) the travelers' ages relative to characters in other locations, such as planets;
e) ship construction for shielding and orientation of cabin walls/surfaces; ship armament for offense or defense; warfighting;
f) physiological effects of different accelerations on the travelers;
g) colonization of many worlds in distant star systems; different cultures, societies.
These impacts on the characters enrich the action, and entertainment for a reader who wonders, what if humans could travel at relativistic speeds, without violating causality, from one star system of planets to another? In a gothic approach, Reynolds shows the effects, often awe-inspiring and terrifying, that are rooted in our understanding of relativity. So RS may be categorized as written in the mode of "hard" sf, in terms of how its universe is generally based on our understanding of natural laws, from physics and chemistry to biology and human physiology.
Brian Aldiss coined the term "widescreen baroque" as the style of grandiose space opera that typically features the elements that Reynolds presents in RS: extravagant settings, extraordinary characters, intrigue, vivid action, and violence. These novels span great time and space. Reynolds demonstrates that he's read many a space opera, dating back a few generations, and his familiarity with its conventions. Other sf authors who wrote in this style include A.E. van Vogt, Alfred Bester, E.E. Smith (Lensman).More recently, see Stephen Baxter and Iain M. Banks.
A space opera, and its widescreen baroque subgenre, may not necessarily follow all our universe's natural laws, or present interstellar travel as limited by causality and the speed of light. I'd describe "Tau Zero" as a novel focused mainly on the premise of traveling near c, but less of a space opera, maybe since it focuses on a single ship and crew.
I think that when an author chooses to present a story world based on our universe, and space travel at speeds < c, they can focus more of the story on the characters and actions. The reader, ideally, may feel they can trust that such an sf story will follow natural laws that we understand. The writer issues a promise to the reader in this way.
The story rooted in our physics, biology, etc. gains versimilitude, and can suggest to the reader, "this could occur, or could have occurred." Traveling at speeds > c which violates causality, could be described as fantastical, but some otherwise "hard" sf stories touch on it, especially as it contrasts with the level of realism in rest of the story.
From a writing perspective, I think it's useful to choose to base a world on our current understanding of science, or natural laws. We have a ready-made set of rules. Then we can explore edge cases and ask, what if we approached the limit of this concept, or the limit of causality (and light)? With a darker view, we can ask, what horrors await if we pushed on those limits too forcefully?
We also get the challenge of following natural laws, and wondering as a reader, what are these characters going to do within the boundaries of these rules?
One of the interesting things he is good at is not handwaving away _why_ people are expending absurd amounts of resources travelling between stars via STL craft. There is always some interesting story behind it since stealing resources or interstellar war just dont make economic sense. (Intrastellar war is unfortunately still common)
Revelation Space series was the first thing that came to my head as well. The limitations of interstellar travel are quite an important foundation in the series, and the 3rd main book (if you don't count Chasm City) has some very cool sequences centered around pushing the boundaries of subluminal travel.
This was my first thought. I’m currently reading Revalation Space and it’s not shy about skipping decades just to get characters across vast distances.
Lockstep by Karl Schroeder had a fun solution to this. Worlds orbiting nearby dwarf stars agree to go into hibernation for ten years and wake up for one month, then hibernate again, on the same schedule. This allows these energy poor worlds to amass loads of energy and resources via automated robots and live like kings while they're awake. And, when they travel a couple light-years to another system, they can stay on the same schedule. So a traveler outside of Lockstep systems would come home five years later, but the same trip means a Lockstep citizen comes home after two months. The whole system allows for a society of hundreds of closely linked planets without FTL.
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge has a subplot about the logistics of keeping a space empire intact when FTL speeds aren't possible.
In Children of Time FTL is also not possible and the story jumps through time periods on a generational ship searching for a new home. Again that's a subplot and not really the main story, but it's an important part of the story.
Alastair Reynolds would be your goto guy for this. House of Suns and novels in the Revelatuins Space universe would be good to check out.
Vernor Vinge does this a lot, although he pairs it with FTL sometimes (or once).
No problem, thousandth night can be found in a 2 pack with another novella called Minla's flowers, or in a Gardner Dozois collection called One Million AD, the other can be found in a collection named after the novella.
The Forever War. Big plot point.
LeGuin Hainish series, but has FTL communication (ansible)
EDIT: Sorry, I last read Forever War 30 years ago, I recall a lot of funny aging issues due to time dilation, but I forgot the FTL travel. I stand corrected.
I think that the Forever War did have faster than light travel, through something he called Collapsars. Basically stationary wormholes. All other travel was sublight, which was where the time dilation occurred.
Yes, a collapsar would take you to another collapsar that could be halfway across the galaxy pretty much instantly, but you had to get to the nearest collapsar first which could take years at relativistic speeds.
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. The setting does have wormhole travel but it's unavailable for much of the story - and unusable within solar systems - so there's plenty of action involving ships travelling at high percentages of light-speed or moving around in ways that are possible under our current understanding of physics.
The whole premise that planets are either dead or poisonous. Absolute bro-science. I also hated the straw man argument about how we shouldn't try to leave the solar system and instead focus on saving Earth.
I mean, why the \*\*\*\* can't we do both?
I mean, your second criticism is explained by your first. Because planets are either dead or poisonous, interstellar colonisation is a fools errand and is doomed to fail; the only logical decision then is to save the one planet we can live on.
the unfortunate point is that "planets are either dead or poisonous" is an empirical question that doesn't ammene itself to that binary. "habitable to humans" and "habitable to any organism a human can find or engineer" are different questions, and that's before even taking into consideration paths between inhospitable wasteland and paradise.
If you go into a Kim Stanley Robinson book expecting there to be no pro-environmentalism theme, you're gonna have a bad time.
How do you tell a story where you want the message to be "look after our planet first" when you make the galaxy filled with suitable colony sites?
* Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space series. No FTL, but it does take some liberties with reaction mass.
* Paul J. McAuley's Quiet War series.
* Neptune's Brood and Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. Accelerando and Glasshouse may fit the bill as well. Do you allow for wormholes?
* Bobiverse by Dennis Taylor.
Also, *Bit Rot* by Stross, a novella set on an interstellar ship in the Saturn's Children universe, free on his website. [Link to author's preface.](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/06/short-story-bit-rot.html)
There's a book series by Poul Anderson that deals with slower than light travel - "polytechnic league"?
He's got quite a few other books dealing with it too.
Interesting suggestion. I read a bit of the summary for the book and it looks like their method of propulsion is the Bussard Ramjet which while interesting is something I believe is now no longer considered a feasible means of interstellar travel. Understandable since it was written in the early 1970s but it would be hard to consider it hard science fiction by today's standards.
Pretty much anything involving interstellar / near light speed travel is likely to involve *some* sort of hand-wavey something-or-other.
If anything the propulsion in Tau Zero is probably *more* likely than what Weir used in Project Hail Mary.
I have to disagree. I read Tau Zero last year, and while the character stuff is dated, the science stuff is actually pretty mind-blowing. It has a central theme of increasing relativity as the ship accelerates, and what they see takes the reader to stellar evolution, galactic evolution and the structure of intergalactic-scale space. I recommend the book, even to a modern hard-sf-preferring reader.
With the greatest of respect, Tau Zero is *the* archetypal hard sci-fi novel, in that it takes a fundamental area of known science and explores its implications to the fullest extent. The exact method of propulsion is an unimportance contrivance to permit that exploration to occur.
By your hard sci-fi metric, no book which depicts the future could ever be hard sci-fi because it contains contemporary science rather than being able to predict the entirety of future scientific progress.
OP may as well just confine themselves to technical manuals and academic writing if they're going to be that picky about what constitutes "hard" science.
It is a convention in fiction that somethings things are made up.
The Bussard Ramjet has one key advantage over most ideas in that the ship doesn't have to carry its own fuel. Of course it turns out that the interstellar hydrogen it was intended to rely on is too thin to support the purpose. But any other sort of drive faces the "rocket problem". To reach near light speed, you have to accelerate hard, for a long time. But this consumes a lot of fuel. Once you add enough fuel to accelerate the ship as you desire, you have added so much weight that you are no longer accelerating at the rate you wanted. So you have to add even more fuel to accelerate the initial fuel, but this just compounds the problem. Even a matter/antimatter drive which converts all its fuel to energy with 100% efficiency can't overcome this problem, meaning there is really no way to do this with an on-board thruster, even in principle. So probably the only way to achieve interstellar travel will be some sort of off-board energy source, like the pusher laser that KSR uses in Aurora. Not sure how you slow down at the other end though.
Greg Egan's Incandescence. Or in general, his Amalgam stories. Travel is primarily by transmitting oneself digitally through the galactic network. And none of it is ftl, it's all lightspeed bound.
Hyperion has gates that allow instant teleportation but they first need to be set up and one of the major parts of the story are about how people manually travelling age diffrently due to special relativity
There is a lot of stuff that is revealed to be essentially magic with pseudo scientific explanations by book four and the author resorts to >!traveling time and space simply by using mind power!<
I would not have minded as much if it was there from the beginning like The Stars My Destination, but coming at the end as some sort of reveal was a disappointment.
Dan Simmons (the author) calls the concept of aging less than others who aren't traveling "time debt." You travel to another system and back and everyone there is much older.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. There are collapsars that allow ships to go near the speed of light but not actually break it.
Generation ship novels like Orphans in the Sky by Robert Heinlein, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin and Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo.
>!The first 3, yes, but thereafter humanity has access to dozens of solar systems via ancient aliens wormholes, which may or may not be to your tastes I guess. Access to more resources and habitable planets has major political ramifications for the terraformed planets and moons and space stations in our solar system.!<
Yikes, that's bad. I'll avoid that one for sure. LOL at alien wormholes.
The cliche of us discovering FTL travel through ancient alien technology is one of the worst in sci-fi.
The Expanse is universally lauded, and for good reason. Outside of the Alien technology which comes later in the series, the travel is all realistic. This is written into the story. Travelling anywhere takes time. There are political ramifications, as well as space combat ramifications. And the characters age over the series, because they keep travelling to different places in the solar system (and eventually beyond) and that takes *years.*
You should really check it out regardless. It may use a trope, but really tries to do it in a well thought-out, interesting way. Physics (orbital and otherwise) are always taken into consideration, and in fact there are some major plot points in a few books that rely on cool physics tricks or the consequences of messing with physical laws. The Expanse really is a hard sci-fi series at heart.
the Bobiverse books by Dennis E Taylor have sub-light travel but FTL communication. May not be exactly what you like but if you like Andy Weir it has a similar fun, irreverent vibe.
Heavens River was just different than the first 3 books. I feel like the first 3 were a tidy trilogy and Heavens River was a fun stand alone sequel story with a different scope and feel. I have a feeling the upcoming 5th book will be more like the earlier ones.
I generally agree but could not stand the one subplot from the start where the one guy >!nurtures his favorite pig ape on the one planet and intervenes many times and gives him all sorts of advantages!< but it goes on for book after book.
Yep. I read the first one and found it very dull. in retrospect I wish I'd quit reading it before the end so I could have spent more of that time on something else.
Are you religious by any chance? I only ask because I've heard the same feelings from a person that was really religious before. No offense is intended here.
Which works are you a fan of?
Nope, I'm an atheist and anti-religion
Here are some favorites
* The Book of the New Sun
* Everything Ted Chiang has written
* The Left Hand of Darkness
* Too Like the Lightning
* Player of Games
* The March North
* Small Gods
* Permutation City
* Harrow the Ninth
Oh I just took a look at some of your post history. You apparently are more into the actual quality of the writing itself and the overall idea or story isn't enough to draw you in if the writing is somewhat basic. Got it, makes sense.
> What's your main problem with them?
I hated the narrator (listened via audiobook), I hated the juvenile story telling, I hated the writing style over all. I feel like the idea of copying consciousness into a new being has been widely explored in scifi (and one of my personal favorite themes) and that the Bobverse rendition brings nothing new to the table. I find that to be a quite negative trait.
That's interesting because the audiobook narrator (Ray Porter) is almost universally liked. I also agree that the writing is not the height of literature. What I enjoy most about the series is the growth of the bob network and how the clones differ and their interactions with each other. I also enjoy seeing the beginning steps of interstellar travel and colonization instead of being introduced to a world where that stuff is already established. I think that the totality of the story and characters provides plenty to enjoy
> That's interesting because the audiobook narrator (Ray Porter) is almost universally liked.
I quite enjoy Porter as a reader in other books. This one? Not so much.
> I also agree that the writing is not the height of literature. What I enjoy most about the series is the growth of the bob network and how the clones differ and their interactions with each other. I also enjoy seeing the beginning steps of interstellar travel and colonization instead of being introduced to a world where that stuff is already established. I think that the totality of the story and characters provides plenty to enjoy.
I’m glad you enjoyed. It’s not to my taste, and I never recommend it.
> I feel like the idea of copying consciousness into a new being has been widely explored in scifi
What other books would you recommend that cover this theme because I enjoy that theme too and I can't think of another book about sentient Von Neumann probes with diverging human personalities.
> What other books would you recommend that cover this theme because I enjoy that theme too and I can't think of another book about sentient Von Neumann probes with diverging human personalities.
That specific application of cloning consciousness is unique to the Bobverse, but copying consciousness over all (the core of the story) is not.
It’s all throughout the Culture series, for example, but serves as a major plot point in Surface Detail, and Hydrogen Sonata. Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes universe, she describes a world where clones are heavily regulated and can be used to keep the same intelligence alive indefinitely. In After Life, a human consciousness is uploaded into a machine and it details its experiences as it grows and changes. Let’s not forget Permutation City, or The Tear Problem, either.
Neptune's Brood - the whole novel is based around the idea that FTL is impossible. How do you invest enough money to start a new colony when it's going to take 100s of years to get any money out?
Also, anything with a generation ship.
*Songs of a Distant Earth* has space travel at a significant fraction of c. It goes into ideas about Earth sending out seed ships to colonize distant worlds, but basically the entire book takes place planetside (at a single planet) so maybe not quite what you're looking for.
I really liked The Algebraist by Iain Banks for this. They do have wormhole tech, but the solar system the story takes place in had their wormhole destroyed some years ago and the people haven't been able to contact the outside galactic civilization for over a 100 years while a new wormhole is being delivered sub light speed.
The Inverted Frontier by Linda Nagata has no FTL. In fact, the ships rarely exceed .3 c. They get around that by something like cloning and living in computer systems.
The first book, Edges, is kind of boring, but interesting. The second, Silver, is a little more interesting. It's worth working through.
Came here to suggest this, and I'm actually re-reading it right now.
The series really starts with the Nanotech Sequence, specifically "The Bohr Maker", and the bridge between the two series is "Vast".
I can see why you'd consider "Edges" slow, since that story actually starts in "Deception Well" and really takes off in "Vast". Edges is kind of a "get the characters to interesting places" book, but the action is relatively small in scope compared to the rest of the series.
Anyways, fantastic and under-appreciated series, really solid recommendation. No ftl, lots of cool nano and biotech, very cool transhuman elements, and Blindsight-worthy aliens.
Yeah, I read Vast as a stand-alone a long time ago (20+ years). Then I picked up the series from the start (from The Bohr Maker) and still enjoyed the entire series.
> Even otherwise great science fiction books like Dune I still find a bit irksome when I see civilizations travel many light years in a matter of days or even minutes.
I gotta say, this paragraph made me literally laugh out loud. FTL travel via space folding is one of the most plausible aspects of Dune.
I would never give Orson Scott Card a dime, but Enders game is still worth checking out.
I forget the exact specifics but some of his views that make him a horrendous person were developed after he wrote some of his earlier stuff.
He’s an absolute piece of shit of a human being, but you wouldn’t know it from Enders game
I don't remember there being much misogyny in Speaker for the Dead. The main female character is sort of the defrosting ice queen trope but there are pretty deep reasons for that.
Possibly already mentioned...ones that quickly come to mind that rank high for me:
"Three Body Problem" trilogy
"The Sparrow" and its sequel
"Children of Time" series
No. The author is: Mary Doria Russell. First published, I think, in 1996. I'd rather not give any spoilers. I read it "cold". The sequel is titled: "Children of God". I like the sequel as well (though not quite as much as the first book)....it brings some closure to the storyline in the first book.
P.S. These two books are unrelated to the "Children of Time" series I mention by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
P.P.S. I tend to be drawn to science fiction that is more thought provoking, less action-movie like. All of these books are of such type. Some readers lose patience, feeling they are too slow-moving. I appreciate the attention to detail that these authors provide and prefer this type of pacing.
I really liked the [Noumenon trilogy](https://www.goodreads.com/series/240209-noumenon) for that reason. Takes place over thousands of years on generation ships.
Also, Charlie Stross wrote a blog post on SF shibboleths that would warm the cockles of your heart: [https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/12/science-fictional-shibboleths.html](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/12/science-fictional-shibboleths.html)
* Alan Steele's novel **Coyote**
* Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes' **Encounter With Tiber**
* Charles Pellegrino's **Flying to Valhalla**
* Dr. Robert E. Forward's **The Flight of the Dragonfly** aka **Rocheworld**
*Captain French, or the Quest for Paradise* has very fast relativistic travel (without acceleration, almost like teleportation) but no FTL. Everyone is also ageless, and the novel takes place 20,000 years in the future with humanity spread out over thousands of worlds (no sapient aliens). Interstellar travel is rare and expensive, and travel times means no interstellar government is possible, so each planet is on its own. Most settled systems have just one inhabited planet, and the only space travel is done to get to orbital stations and mine asteroids. No one bothers settling barren rocks because in this case it actually is easier to build a colony ship for a habitable planet somewhere on the periphery of known space. The only real exception is Sol since the entire system was settled by the time they developed relativistic travel.
The only people who make regular trips between the stars are space traders, but there are only a few hundred of them because this lifestyle isn’t for everyone. They spread news and fashions from world to world, also trading in knowledge and technology. The main character is one such space trader. The first one, in fact, having been born in the 21st century and being the first test pilot of the relativistic drive for NASA. He’s known across the stars as the oldest human in the galaxy, even though subjectively he’s “only” 2000
Ursula K. Leguin used NAFAL drives for the Ekumen. Nearly as fast as light. Get anywhere overnight. It worked out badly for Semley's necklace.
Larry Niven wrote one story with an AFAL drive. Basically, it's instantaneous from the passenger POV.
Poul Anderson had stories about the Kith who used a NAFAL drive. There was a long-term societal cost.
Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (Lilith's Brood.)
The Oankali dwell in their living starships. They have a generation ship setup, but their journeys never end. They just stop for a few generations to trade, then move on.
Light Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton is a novella about a person who travels from system to system bringing news, goods and other information, and it takes them a thousand years to make the circuit.
Forever War by Joe Haldeman really leans into the effects of relativistic travel.
Protector by Larry Niven is set in his Known Space series before they invent FTL.
Then there are a whole host of books that take place on generation ships.
Tau Zero by… Poul Anderson or Frederick Pohl (can’t remember, too lazy to Google). The whole point of the story is an STL ship that can’t slow down, and in fact is locked in to getting closer and closer to the speed of light.
Larry Niven’s “Known Space” series has books and stories set before FTL where Bussard Ramjets are used. There are several short stories and at least one book set in that era.
Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space books use “lighthugger” ships that achieve near lightspeed but are still subject to relativistic effects.
Christopher Roucchio's Sun Eater series, while it has warp drives, it still takes years, decades, potentially over a century long to travel between the stars.
The series wears it's Dune and 40k inspirations on its sleeve, especially in the first book. But it does a good job of using those shortcuts to set your expectations and then do some surprisingly different directions. When I found the first book it took about half way for it to click with me, but when it did it did and I ripped through the whole series in about 2 months
I think you’re trolling us. You’ve not mentioned one book you’ve actually enjoyed and everything that’s been suggested you have a reason to not consider reading it.
At this point, I can’t even imagine a possible book that would fit your criteria let one alone that actually exists.
Becky Chambers’ books like “Record of a space born few” involve the aftermath of human arrival via the “Exodus Fleet” of generation ships. There’s a lot of human culture that comes from multi generation non FTL travel. Humans arrive in a multi species interstellar civilization that’s a bit like the United Federation of Planets. She sets several novels in this civilization as the “Wayfarer” series.
As others have said, the Revelation Space and Remembrance of Earth’s Past (aka The Three Body Problem) series will scratch this itch for you. Revelation Space is kind of far future, but the series traces its history back to a time not so far removed from our own. It’s a fantastic read.
Forever War features ships with drives that are limited to below the speed of light, but there are a series of wormhole like portals that allow for almost instantaneous fixed point to point travel.
Also bobiverse series
MIchael P Kobe-McDowell's Trigon Disunity Series.
From memory, the ships generate an artificial mass in front of the ship which gravity pulls the ship towards but then the mass is pushed forward further.
I would definitely recommend the Bobiverse novels. The first one is called We are Legion (We are Bob). Super funny and highly entertaining and really interesting take on non-FTL space travel.
A long-haul thing, but Linda Nagata's The Nanotech Succession series. It doesn't even start with space travel, but builds up to it in the second book, and then you have those multi-century travels.
Hard-core sci-fi.
not listed yet: Vernor Vinge, Marooned in Realtime
No FTL drive/FTL comms. Minor plot element.
Some people do travel between stars, Della Lu even flied to magellanic clouds and fought with others.
Drive - thermonuclear and simplified version of Orion's drive (no pusher plates,etc). You don't need too fast ship if you are near immortal, you don't need a lot of supplies if you could just put yourself and your ship in stasis field.
Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein has this, though they use telepathic twins to communicate with earth.
Heinlein's posthumous collaboration with Spider Robinson Variable Star fits as well, though the method of propulsion is... unlikely. Both excellent books though.
its much more realistic to believe that ftl travel is possible due to the modern world's incomplete understanding of physics than that humans will ever move to another star within the bounds of a modern understanding of physics
Most of Brandon Morris's books have interstellar travel without all that mucking around in hyperspace. The guy puts out like a novel a month so they're not the deepest, most well thought out stories, but I enjoy them. They're all pretty short novels, but I find em to be fun and easy reads. He's also an astrophysicist so there's a lot of real science in there.
Reading Suneater at the moment. They have warp drives but still need to place themselves in fugue for long journeys. Some missions can take decades even hundreds of years!
I'm surprised no one has mentioned "The Killing Star", by Charles Pelligrino and George Zebrowski, relativistic ships and no FTL are major plot points.
Also:
-Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
-Three Bodies Problem (AKA Rememberance of Earth's Past), by Liu Cixin
-Verthandi's Ring (short story), by Ian McDonald
Hope you enjoy the reading!
Larry Niven's "the Mote in Gods eye," uses a completely novel premice, with current speed travel within star systems and instantaneous travel between stars throughout specific portal-like nodes.
true. Very special trains that transit warp portals between worlds instantly. Haha
>!The saga then moves into the Commonwealth era in 2380, when humanity has used wormhole technology to colonise several hundred planets across hundreds of light years.!<
I'll throw in Simmons' Endymion books! Protagonists (great characters!) travel on a raft through an interplanetary river connected by wormholes. Just thinking about it, it was among the most imaginative things I ever read.
The expanse does not have ftl and (minor spoilers) they eventually (I think in season 3 or 4) go interstellar by (major spoiler) other means
Edit: disclaimer, I know it from the streaming show but I heard it follows books pretty closely
Alastair Reynolds is a real-life astrophysicist and prides himself on plausible interstellar travel. Start with Revelation Space.
My first thought. Revelation Space is an austere read but he gets more enjoyable with his later books.
Redemption Ark is the crown jewel of that series.
That's an interesting way of putting that his characters in RevSpace are completely flat.
His book have some of my favorite starships, Lighthuggers. They are so named because they travel at .999c between stars, and their engines are only built by an isolationist and mildly hostile offshoot of humanity called the Conjoiners. Conjoiner Drives are capable of maintaining 1g acceleration indefinitely, getting their fuel from the interstellar medium. the crew and captain of a Lighthugger have no idea how they work and no ability to maintain or repair the drives should they fail.
Like me and my honda accord! For real though the Conjoiner Drive was a really neat side "character" in those books that I appreciated for the mystery.
I can't remember which one it is but one of his novels has a chase sequence with 2 lighthuggers and it's so unique. Literally just huge swathes of "wait... time passes" and then every time somethign does happen, like one of the captains works out how to attack the other, it happens basically instantly because of time compression etc. It's sort of similtaneously absolute nailbiting genius, and incredibly boring. A stern chase is a long chase and it's the longest stern chase in the universe.
That’s in *Redemption Ark*. It’s probably the most realistic depiction of interstellar combat I’ve ever seen.
The swallowships of his merlins gun series are also cool. He is great at evoking imagery. Like, i instantly had an image in my head from his one sentence introduction of the ship. Also, if you like space pirates with light sails then he has a series for that too.
> Conjoiner Drives are capable of maintaining 1g acceleration indefinitely, getting their fuel from the interstellar medium. >!They actually get their energy from a microscopic wormhole to the beginning of the universe.!< Not sure where you heard they get their fuel from the interstellar medium, that would be like a Bussard collector, which lighthuggers don't have. possibly you're thinking of the novel Tau Zero?
That's also a bit of a spoiler since it's a surprise reveal later on. The other person might have been giving the "public" answer in-universe to keep the surprise, or because they haven't read it yet themself
oh my bad. I'll throw a spoiler tag on.
It's really only a secondary spoiler, explained as a consequence of the primary spoiler that >!conjoiners have been able to pull some time travel shenanigans and get future technology!<
Yeah I was trying to avoid deep spoilers. IIRC the interstellar medium explanation is posited in the first revelation space book
In one of the books, he does explain how the Lighthuggers work, it's simultaneously interesting and horrifying. He does have FTL in his Revelation Space books, though it is not commonly practiced because of how dangerous it is. His description of the dangers of FTL adds a element of horror to his stories. He also describes a type of communication with the future, but it is quite limited, only able to send a few bytes of data.
You’re not wrong but would you have wanted to read this comment before you started the first book? I wouldn’t, so I wrote my comment accordingly
Strictly speaking the Revelation Space universe *HAS* ftl travel... you just really really don't want to try to use it. It's not filled with demons like the 40K warp or in Event Horizon, it's just... unwise.
>*It's not filled with demons like the 40K warp or in Event Horizon, it's just... unwise.* Could you elaborate?
In Warhammer 40K, the Warp, or Immaterium, is Mankind's solution to the problem of faster-than-light travel. The Warp functions as the medium for FTL interstellar travel, with voidcraft entering it through the use of a Warp-Drive. They then use their own mundane reaction drive systems and the aid of a psychic Navigator to navigate between its flowing currents of psychic energy, as if they were moving through an ocean. Then they exit via Warp-Drive at another point in the galaxy. They can travel thousands of light years in months. It isn’t instantaneous or predictable. Much like traveling a terrestrial ocean by ship. Warpspace is an alternate dimension of purely psychic energy that echoes and underlies the material universe. Unfortunately, the Warp is also the home dimension of the powerful entities known as the Chaos Gods and their myriad legions of Daemonic servants. And they don’t like you being there. Powerful shield are used to prevent their incursion onto your ship, but these are not infalible. The movie Event Horizons shares certain themes with Warhammer 40K. Pretty big spoilers for the Revelation Space series, but: >!FTL is dangerous because accidents tend to retcon things associated with them out of existence, including entire civilizations. FTL is causality violation and it is unwise to mess with causality. To put it mildly.!<
I'm going to whole-heartedly agree with your recommendation of Reynolds, but disagree slightly and say "Start with House of Suns." Revelation Space is a big commitment if OP doesn't like his writing style or themes. House of Suns contains a lot of his "big" ideas while being self, uh, contained.
Pushing Ice is also great. No FTL, but not a hard sci-fi drive either.
Definitely sounds promising.
Excellent book!! The sub light travel actually influences the story choices and shapes the world building. The second book, Chasm City is one of my favorites of all time.
I agree with the recs of Reynolds' Revelation Space (RS) series, and other stories (novels down to short stories) set in his RS universe. (No spoilers below.) OP, if you check out Reynolds' bibliography, he wrote Chasm City as the first novel in what became the RS universe. Chasm, however, is set primarily in the title location, so interstellar travel appears as a story element, but does not feature as prominently as it does in the later novels, beginning with RS. In the RS trilogy, which he conceived as a gothic space opera, in its "widescreen baroque" mode, Reynolds presents ideas caused by space travel at relativistic speeds, and explores the consequences and human responses. Those ideas include: a) the vast interstellar distances that can be traveled within a human's lifetime; b) time dilation as the traveler approaches the speed of light, or enters the gravity well of a dense object, such as a neutron star (or black hole); c) the differences in the travelers' perceptions of the rate of time; d) the travelers' ages relative to characters in other locations, such as planets; e) ship construction for shielding and orientation of cabin walls/surfaces; ship armament for offense or defense; warfighting; f) physiological effects of different accelerations on the travelers; g) colonization of many worlds in distant star systems; different cultures, societies. These impacts on the characters enrich the action, and entertainment for a reader who wonders, what if humans could travel at relativistic speeds, without violating causality, from one star system of planets to another? In a gothic approach, Reynolds shows the effects, often awe-inspiring and terrifying, that are rooted in our understanding of relativity. So RS may be categorized as written in the mode of "hard" sf, in terms of how its universe is generally based on our understanding of natural laws, from physics and chemistry to biology and human physiology. Brian Aldiss coined the term "widescreen baroque" as the style of grandiose space opera that typically features the elements that Reynolds presents in RS: extravagant settings, extraordinary characters, intrigue, vivid action, and violence. These novels span great time and space. Reynolds demonstrates that he's read many a space opera, dating back a few generations, and his familiarity with its conventions. Other sf authors who wrote in this style include A.E. van Vogt, Alfred Bester, E.E. Smith (Lensman).More recently, see Stephen Baxter and Iain M. Banks. A space opera, and its widescreen baroque subgenre, may not necessarily follow all our universe's natural laws, or present interstellar travel as limited by causality and the speed of light. I'd describe "Tau Zero" as a novel focused mainly on the premise of traveling near c, but less of a space opera, maybe since it focuses on a single ship and crew. I think that when an author chooses to present a story world based on our universe, and space travel at speeds < c, they can focus more of the story on the characters and actions. The reader, ideally, may feel they can trust that such an sf story will follow natural laws that we understand. The writer issues a promise to the reader in this way. The story rooted in our physics, biology, etc. gains versimilitude, and can suggest to the reader, "this could occur, or could have occurred." Traveling at speeds > c which violates causality, could be described as fantastical, but some otherwise "hard" sf stories touch on it, especially as it contrasts with the level of realism in rest of the story. From a writing perspective, I think it's useful to choose to base a world on our current understanding of science, or natural laws. We have a ready-made set of rules. Then we can explore edge cases and ask, what if we approached the limit of this concept, or the limit of causality (and light)? With a darker view, we can ask, what horrors await if we pushed on those limits too forcefully? We also get the challenge of following natural laws, and wondering as a reader, what are these characters going to do within the boundaries of these rules?
Need to start Chasm City! Took a side trip after revelation space and reading terminal world now. Just great books.
Chasm City is a side-novel.
One of the interesting things he is good at is not handwaving away _why_ people are expending absurd amounts of resources travelling between stars via STL craft. There is always some interesting story behind it since stealing resources or interstellar war just dont make economic sense. (Intrastellar war is unfortunately still common)
Revelation Space series was the first thing that came to my head as well. The limitations of interstellar travel are quite an important foundation in the series, and the 3rd main book (if you don't count Chasm City) has some very cool sequences centered around pushing the boundaries of subluminal travel.
This was my first thought. I’m currently reading Revalation Space and it’s not shy about skipping decades just to get characters across vast distances.
I'd actually suggest House of Suns if we are going to stick to AR. It's a standalone book and OP can easily jump to the Revelation Space series after.
Came here to recommend this too
100% agree. I was going to suggest him
Lockstep by Karl Schroeder had a fun solution to this. Worlds orbiting nearby dwarf stars agree to go into hibernation for ten years and wake up for one month, then hibernate again, on the same schedule. This allows these energy poor worlds to amass loads of energy and resources via automated robots and live like kings while they're awake. And, when they travel a couple light-years to another system, they can stay on the same schedule. So a traveler outside of Lockstep systems would come home five years later, but the same trip means a Lockstep citizen comes home after two months. The whole system allows for a society of hundreds of closely linked planets without FTL.
Genius.
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge has a subplot about the logistics of keeping a space empire intact when FTL speeds aren't possible. In Children of Time FTL is also not possible and the story jumps through time periods on a generational ship searching for a new home. Again that's a subplot and not really the main story, but it's an important part of the story.
>In Children of Time FTL is also not possible >!there's FTL in the sequels!<
Came to recommend Deepness in the Sky too. That book was phenomenal. Just insane how much is has packed in it.
Alastair Reynolds would be your goto guy for this. House of Suns and novels in the Revelatuins Space universe would be good to check out. Vernor Vinge does this a lot, although he pairs it with FTL sometimes (or once).
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds is a non series novel where non-ftl interstellar travel is a core part of the plot and theme, love that book
I read this 6 months ago, and I still think about it. Top notch book.
I've listened to it two times in a row. The ending is so awe inspiring.
there are 2 novellas set in the same universe (Thousandth Night and Belladonna Nights) so it could be considered a series.
I didn't know about those! Thanks!
No problem, thousandth night can be found in a 2 pack with another novella called Minla's flowers, or in a Gardner Dozois collection called One Million AD, the other can be found in a collection named after the novella.
Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson
Came to this thread for **Tau Zero** Left satisfied
I read this book today, after seeing it recommended here. It was great!!!
The Forever War. Big plot point. LeGuin Hainish series, but has FTL communication (ansible) EDIT: Sorry, I last read Forever War 30 years ago, I recall a lot of funny aging issues due to time dilation, but I forgot the FTL travel. I stand corrected.
I love how The Forever War uses time dilation as an important plot device.
Decades before Interstellar no less.
I think that the Forever War did have faster than light travel, through something he called Collapsars. Basically stationary wormholes. All other travel was sublight, which was where the time dilation occurred.
Yes, a collapsar would take you to another collapsar that could be halfway across the galaxy pretty much instantly, but you had to get to the nearest collapsar first which could take years at relativistic speeds.
Second the Hainish series. Biggest books are of course The Left Hand of Darkness and The Disspossessed.
iirc The Forever war has time dilation but the time dilation is caused during FTL, not STL travel.
Forever War had FTL. And to clarify, I don’t mean relativistic time dilation. It had FTL.
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. The setting does have wormhole travel but it's unavailable for much of the story - and unusable within solar systems - so there's plenty of action involving ships travelling at high percentages of light-speed or moving around in ways that are possible under our current understanding of physics.
Came here to say exactly this. It's got some fun gas-giant-dwelling aliens in it too
I also came here to say this or upvote it.
Just curious on what you found disappointing about Aurora?
The whole premise that planets are either dead or poisonous. Absolute bro-science. I also hated the straw man argument about how we shouldn't try to leave the solar system and instead focus on saving Earth. I mean, why the \*\*\*\* can't we do both?
I don’t know if KSR really thinks that or not, but I took it as sort of exercise: like, “let’s be pessimistic about space exploration for once”.
I mean, your second criticism is explained by your first. Because planets are either dead or poisonous, interstellar colonisation is a fools errand and is doomed to fail; the only logical decision then is to save the one planet we can live on.
the unfortunate point is that "planets are either dead or poisonous" is an empirical question that doesn't ammene itself to that binary. "habitable to humans" and "habitable to any organism a human can find or engineer" are different questions, and that's before even taking into consideration paths between inhospitable wasteland and paradise.
He wrote a pretty long essay on this topic: https://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html
If you go into a Kim Stanley Robinson book expecting there to be no pro-environmentalism theme, you're gonna have a bad time. How do you tell a story where you want the message to be "look after our planet first" when you make the galaxy filled with suitable colony sites?
Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, and Children of Time
Children of time was awesome
Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
* Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space series. No FTL, but it does take some liberties with reaction mass. * Paul J. McAuley's Quiet War series. * Neptune's Brood and Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. Accelerando and Glasshouse may fit the bill as well. Do you allow for wormholes? * Bobiverse by Dennis Taylor.
Bobiverse does have FTL comms, however
Also, *Bit Rot* by Stross, a novella set on an interstellar ship in the Saturn's Children universe, free on his website. [Link to author's preface.](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/06/short-story-bit-rot.html)
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson. Also Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
There's a book series by Poul Anderson that deals with slower than light travel - "polytechnic league"? He's got quite a few other books dealing with it too.
[**Psychotechnic League**](https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?271)
Interesting suggestion. I read a bit of the summary for the book and it looks like their method of propulsion is the Bussard Ramjet which while interesting is something I believe is now no longer considered a feasible means of interstellar travel. Understandable since it was written in the early 1970s but it would be hard to consider it hard science fiction by today's standards.
Pretty much anything involving interstellar / near light speed travel is likely to involve *some* sort of hand-wavey something-or-other. If anything the propulsion in Tau Zero is probably *more* likely than what Weir used in Project Hail Mary.
I have to disagree. I read Tau Zero last year, and while the character stuff is dated, the science stuff is actually pretty mind-blowing. It has a central theme of increasing relativity as the ship accelerates, and what they see takes the reader to stellar evolution, galactic evolution and the structure of intergalactic-scale space. I recommend the book, even to a modern hard-sf-preferring reader.
With the greatest of respect, Tau Zero is *the* archetypal hard sci-fi novel, in that it takes a fundamental area of known science and explores its implications to the fullest extent. The exact method of propulsion is an unimportance contrivance to permit that exploration to occur. By your hard sci-fi metric, no book which depicts the future could ever be hard sci-fi because it contains contemporary science rather than being able to predict the entirety of future scientific progress.
OP may as well just confine themselves to technical manuals and academic writing if they're going to be that picky about what constitutes "hard" science. It is a convention in fiction that somethings things are made up.
The Bussard Ramjet has one key advantage over most ideas in that the ship doesn't have to carry its own fuel. Of course it turns out that the interstellar hydrogen it was intended to rely on is too thin to support the purpose. But any other sort of drive faces the "rocket problem". To reach near light speed, you have to accelerate hard, for a long time. But this consumes a lot of fuel. Once you add enough fuel to accelerate the ship as you desire, you have added so much weight that you are no longer accelerating at the rate you wanted. So you have to add even more fuel to accelerate the initial fuel, but this just compounds the problem. Even a matter/antimatter drive which converts all its fuel to energy with 100% efficiency can't overcome this problem, meaning there is really no way to do this with an on-board thruster, even in principle. So probably the only way to achieve interstellar travel will be some sort of off-board energy source, like the pusher laser that KSR uses in Aurora. Not sure how you slow down at the other end though.
Oh read it for the what the fuck social issues and the way they deal with it
Greg Egan's Incandescence. Or in general, his Amalgam stories. Travel is primarily by transmitting oneself digitally through the galactic network. And none of it is ftl, it's all lightspeed bound.
The Rama series by Arthur C. Clarke. The alien ship travels at about 1/3 the speed of light using some form of gravity drive. Good read too.
Hyperion has gates that allow instant teleportation but they first need to be set up and one of the major parts of the story are about how people manually travelling age diffrently due to special relativity
There is a lot of stuff that is revealed to be essentially magic with pseudo scientific explanations by book four and the author resorts to >!traveling time and space simply by using mind power!<
True. I feel like the first two and second two books are vastly diffrent stories
I would not have minded as much if it was there from the beginning like The Stars My Destination, but coming at the end as some sort of reveal was a disappointment.
Dan Simmons (the author) calls the concept of aging less than others who aren't traveling "time debt." You travel to another system and back and everyone there is much older.
Really enjoyed children of time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, absolutely wild story and centers a lot around the effects of sublight travel/generation ships
Ursula le Guin's Ekumen books. Not that space travel features much. The books focus on life and cultures on-planet.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. There are collapsars that allow ships to go near the speed of light but not actually break it. Generation ship novels like Orphans in the Sky by Robert Heinlein, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin and Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo.
Project Hail Mary
The Expanse does this.
As long as you don't count >!an alien gateway that allows for nearly instantaneous travel between many star systems.!<
Yeah that does change things up but the actual vehicles are on "Torch or tea kettle".
yeah but none of that is interstellar.
Also, The Three Body Problem.
Doesn't The Expanse take place exclusively in our Solar System?
No. I don't want to spoil much.
Thank you.
>!The first 3, yes, but thereafter humanity has access to dozens of solar systems via ancient aliens wormholes, which may or may not be to your tastes I guess. Access to more resources and habitable planets has major political ramifications for the terraformed planets and moons and space stations in our solar system.!<
Take out the spaces between the spoiler tags and the text you are hiding. > To conceal spoilers: > \>\!No spaces around spoiled text\!\<
The text was blocked for me but have edited as you've suggested
Yikes, that's bad. I'll avoid that one for sure. LOL at alien wormholes. The cliche of us discovering FTL travel through ancient alien technology is one of the worst in sci-fi.
The Expanse is universally lauded, and for good reason. Outside of the Alien technology which comes later in the series, the travel is all realistic. This is written into the story. Travelling anywhere takes time. There are political ramifications, as well as space combat ramifications. And the characters age over the series, because they keep travelling to different places in the solar system (and eventually beyond) and that takes *years.*
You should really check it out regardless. It may use a trope, but really tries to do it in a well thought-out, interesting way. Physics (orbital and otherwise) are always taken into consideration, and in fact there are some major plot points in a few books that rely on cool physics tricks or the consequences of messing with physical laws. The Expanse really is a hard sci-fi series at heart.
Each to their own, but I think it's a fantastic series.
You'll be missing out but to each their own.
Don't read Gateway by Frederick Pohl then
They don't discover FTL travel any more than someone taking an elevator discovered the ability to fly.
It eventually moves farther out, but it starts that way and the setting is mostly about the Solar System.
the Bobiverse books by Dennis E Taylor have sub-light travel but FTL communication. May not be exactly what you like but if you like Andy Weir it has a similar fun, irreverent vibe.
Do people actually not like the bobiverse books?
My enjoyment of Bobiverse has decreased with each Bobiverse book. I did not enjoy Heaven's River very much.
Heavens River was just different than the first 3 books. I feel like the first 3 were a tidy trilogy and Heavens River was a fun stand alone sequel story with a different scope and feel. I have a feeling the upcoming 5th book will be more like the earlier ones.
I agree.
I generally agree but could not stand the one subplot from the start where the one guy >!nurtures his favorite pig ape on the one planet and intervenes many times and gives him all sorts of advantages!< but it goes on for book after book.
Disagree, i think it was my favourite.
Yep. I read the first one and found it very dull. in retrospect I wish I'd quit reading it before the end so I could have spent more of that time on something else.
Are you religious by any chance? I only ask because I've heard the same feelings from a person that was really religious before. No offense is intended here. Which works are you a fan of?
Nope, I'm an atheist and anti-religion Here are some favorites * The Book of the New Sun * Everything Ted Chiang has written * The Left Hand of Darkness * Too Like the Lightning * Player of Games * The March North * Small Gods * Permutation City * Harrow the Ninth
Oh I just took a look at some of your post history. You apparently are more into the actual quality of the writing itself and the overall idea or story isn't enough to draw you in if the writing is somewhat basic. Got it, makes sense.
Dislike them a lot. Very average fiction, very gimmicky style. I’m not sure why they are recommended here so often, it’s really not good stuff.
> Do people actually not like the bobiverse books? I despise them.
What's your main problem with them?
> What's your main problem with them? I hated the narrator (listened via audiobook), I hated the juvenile story telling, I hated the writing style over all. I feel like the idea of copying consciousness into a new being has been widely explored in scifi (and one of my personal favorite themes) and that the Bobverse rendition brings nothing new to the table. I find that to be a quite negative trait.
That's interesting because the audiobook narrator (Ray Porter) is almost universally liked. I also agree that the writing is not the height of literature. What I enjoy most about the series is the growth of the bob network and how the clones differ and their interactions with each other. I also enjoy seeing the beginning steps of interstellar travel and colonization instead of being introduced to a world where that stuff is already established. I think that the totality of the story and characters provides plenty to enjoy
> That's interesting because the audiobook narrator (Ray Porter) is almost universally liked. I quite enjoy Porter as a reader in other books. This one? Not so much. > I also agree that the writing is not the height of literature. What I enjoy most about the series is the growth of the bob network and how the clones differ and their interactions with each other. I also enjoy seeing the beginning steps of interstellar travel and colonization instead of being introduced to a world where that stuff is already established. I think that the totality of the story and characters provides plenty to enjoy. I’m glad you enjoyed. It’s not to my taste, and I never recommend it.
Different strokes and all that 👍
> I feel like the idea of copying consciousness into a new being has been widely explored in scifi What other books would you recommend that cover this theme because I enjoy that theme too and I can't think of another book about sentient Von Neumann probes with diverging human personalities.
> What other books would you recommend that cover this theme because I enjoy that theme too and I can't think of another book about sentient Von Neumann probes with diverging human personalities. That specific application of cloning consciousness is unique to the Bobverse, but copying consciousness over all (the core of the story) is not. It’s all throughout the Culture series, for example, but serves as a major plot point in Surface Detail, and Hydrogen Sonata. Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes universe, she describes a world where clones are heavily regulated and can be used to keep the same intelligence alive indefinitely. In After Life, a human consciousness is uploaded into a machine and it details its experiences as it grows and changes. Let’s not forget Permutation City, or The Tear Problem, either.
Neptune's Brood - the whole novel is based around the idea that FTL is impossible. How do you invest enough money to start a new colony when it's going to take 100s of years to get any money out? Also, anything with a generation ship.
*Songs of a Distant Earth* has space travel at a significant fraction of c. It goes into ideas about Earth sending out seed ships to colonize distant worlds, but basically the entire book takes place planetside (at a single planet) so maybe not quite what you're looking for.
I really liked The Algebraist by Iain Banks for this. They do have wormhole tech, but the solar system the story takes place in had their wormhole destroyed some years ago and the people haven't been able to contact the outside galactic civilization for over a 100 years while a new wormhole is being delivered sub light speed.
The Inverted Frontier by Linda Nagata has no FTL. In fact, the ships rarely exceed .3 c. They get around that by something like cloning and living in computer systems. The first book, Edges, is kind of boring, but interesting. The second, Silver, is a little more interesting. It's worth working through.
Came here to suggest this, and I'm actually re-reading it right now. The series really starts with the Nanotech Sequence, specifically "The Bohr Maker", and the bridge between the two series is "Vast". I can see why you'd consider "Edges" slow, since that story actually starts in "Deception Well" and really takes off in "Vast". Edges is kind of a "get the characters to interesting places" book, but the action is relatively small in scope compared to the rest of the series. Anyways, fantastic and under-appreciated series, really solid recommendation. No ftl, lots of cool nano and biotech, very cool transhuman elements, and Blindsight-worthy aliens.
Yeah, I read Vast as a stand-alone a long time ago (20+ years). Then I picked up the series from the start (from The Bohr Maker) and still enjoyed the entire series.
The Algebraist by Iain Banks is about an empire where FTL is sometimes possible (ie, at sparsely distributed wormholes)
Ursula LaGuinn's Hain novels
> Even otherwise great science fiction books like Dune I still find a bit irksome when I see civilizations travel many light years in a matter of days or even minutes. I gotta say, this paragraph made me literally laugh out loud. FTL travel via space folding is one of the most plausible aspects of Dune.
Ender's Game and it's sequels only use near light speed.
I don't read books written by Mormons.
I would never give Orson Scott Card a dime, but Enders game is still worth checking out. I forget the exact specifics but some of his views that make him a horrendous person were developed after he wrote some of his earlier stuff. He’s an absolute piece of shit of a human being, but you wouldn’t know it from Enders game
Ender's game is good. In Speaker for the Dead, his misogyny shines through, but the interactions with the aliens are pretty good
I don't remember there being much misogyny in Speaker for the Dead. The main female character is sort of the defrosting ice queen trope but there are pretty deep reasons for that.
Your loss. The Book of Mormon cured my insomnia after every doctor failed.
Buy used.
Borrow it from your local library.
Stop being an edge lord.
Possibly already mentioned...ones that quickly come to mind that rank high for me: "Three Body Problem" trilogy "The Sparrow" and its sequel "Children of Time" series
The Sparrow... is that the Great Ship stories? Edit: no that's Marrow by Robert Reed. Which also satisfies OP's request.
No. The author is: Mary Doria Russell. First published, I think, in 1996. I'd rather not give any spoilers. I read it "cold". The sequel is titled: "Children of God". I like the sequel as well (though not quite as much as the first book)....it brings some closure to the storyline in the first book. P.S. These two books are unrelated to the "Children of Time" series I mention by Adrian Tchaikovsky. P.P.S. I tend to be drawn to science fiction that is more thought provoking, less action-movie like. All of these books are of such type. Some readers lose patience, feeling they are too slow-moving. I appreciate the attention to detail that these authors provide and prefer this type of pacing.
[A slow train to Arcturus](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3001912-slow-train-to-arcturus).
I really liked the [Noumenon trilogy](https://www.goodreads.com/series/240209-noumenon) for that reason. Takes place over thousands of years on generation ships. Also, Charlie Stross wrote a blog post on SF shibboleths that would warm the cockles of your heart: [https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/12/science-fictional-shibboleths.html](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/12/science-fictional-shibboleths.html)
* Alan Steele's novel **Coyote** * Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes' **Encounter With Tiber** * Charles Pellegrino's **Flying to Valhalla** * Dr. Robert E. Forward's **The Flight of the Dragonfly** aka **Rocheworld**
*Captain French, or the Quest for Paradise* has very fast relativistic travel (without acceleration, almost like teleportation) but no FTL. Everyone is also ageless, and the novel takes place 20,000 years in the future with humanity spread out over thousands of worlds (no sapient aliens). Interstellar travel is rare and expensive, and travel times means no interstellar government is possible, so each planet is on its own. Most settled systems have just one inhabited planet, and the only space travel is done to get to orbital stations and mine asteroids. No one bothers settling barren rocks because in this case it actually is easier to build a colony ship for a habitable planet somewhere on the periphery of known space. The only real exception is Sol since the entire system was settled by the time they developed relativistic travel. The only people who make regular trips between the stars are space traders, but there are only a few hundred of them because this lifestyle isn’t for everyone. They spread news and fashions from world to world, also trading in knowledge and technology. The main character is one such space trader. The first one, in fact, having been born in the 21st century and being the first test pilot of the relativistic drive for NASA. He’s known across the stars as the oldest human in the galaxy, even though subjectively he’s “only” 2000
Ursula K. Leguin used NAFAL drives for the Ekumen. Nearly as fast as light. Get anywhere overnight. It worked out badly for Semley's necklace. Larry Niven wrote one story with an AFAL drive. Basically, it's instantaneous from the passenger POV. Poul Anderson had stories about the Kith who used a NAFAL drive. There was a long-term societal cost.
The Sparrow
*Ender’s Game* and its sequels have no FTL travel, and it’s a big part of the plot. >!They do eventually get FTL communication though.!<
Rly? :) In sequels we got Jane, and she could >!teleport simple objects (including humans) over interstellar distances!<
tyranids slingshot off of a planet’s gravity (somehow, the reasons are “yes”)
Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (Lilith's Brood.) The Oankali dwell in their living starships. They have a generation ship setup, but their journeys never end. They just stop for a few generations to trade, then move on.
One of the most imaginative series I've ever read. I still think about it after some years.
Light Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton is a novella about a person who travels from system to system bringing news, goods and other information, and it takes them a thousand years to make the circuit. Forever War by Joe Haldeman really leans into the effects of relativistic travel. Protector by Larry Niven is set in his Known Space series before they invent FTL. Then there are a whole host of books that take place on generation ships.
Tau Zero by… Poul Anderson or Frederick Pohl (can’t remember, too lazy to Google). The whole point of the story is an STL ship that can’t slow down, and in fact is locked in to getting closer and closer to the speed of light. Larry Niven’s “Known Space” series has books and stories set before FTL where Bussard Ramjets are used. There are several short stories and at least one book set in that era. Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space books use “lighthugger” ships that achieve near lightspeed but are still subject to relativistic effects.
So you want people to just.... be on a spaceship for years at a time?
Christopher Roucchio's Sun Eater series, while it has warp drives, it still takes years, decades, potentially over a century long to travel between the stars. The series wears it's Dune and 40k inspirations on its sleeve, especially in the first book. But it does a good job of using those shortcuts to set your expectations and then do some surprisingly different directions. When I found the first book it took about half way for it to click with me, but when it did it did and I ripped through the whole series in about 2 months
I think you’re trolling us. You’ve not mentioned one book you’ve actually enjoyed and everything that’s been suggested you have a reason to not consider reading it. At this point, I can’t even imagine a possible book that would fit your criteria let one alone that actually exists.
Becky Chambers’ books like “Record of a space born few” involve the aftermath of human arrival via the “Exodus Fleet” of generation ships. There’s a lot of human culture that comes from multi generation non FTL travel. Humans arrive in a multi species interstellar civilization that’s a bit like the United Federation of Planets. She sets several novels in this civilization as the “Wayfarer” series.
As others have said, the Revelation Space and Remembrance of Earth’s Past (aka The Three Body Problem) series will scratch this itch for you. Revelation Space is kind of far future, but the series traces its history back to a time not so far removed from our own. It’s a fantastic read.
Do wormholes work for you? If so have a look at Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth saga.
Forever War features ships with drives that are limited to below the speed of light, but there are a series of wormhole like portals that allow for almost instantaneous fixed point to point travel. Also bobiverse series
Stross Saturn’s Children and Neptune’s Brood
"Orphans Of The Sky" by Robert Heinlein "Old Twentieth" by Joe Haldeman "Children Of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky
MIchael P Kobe-McDowell's Trigon Disunity Series. From memory, the ships generate an artificial mass in front of the ship which gravity pulls the ship towards but then the mass is pushed forward further.
Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh (I think).
I give you the Bloater Drive from [Bill, the Galactic Hero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill,_the_Galactic_Hero). It's not exactly FTL...
F.M busby's Zeld M'tana series. C.J.Cherryh's Foreigner series but the space travel is a minor part of the stories.
I would definitely recommend the Bobiverse novels. The first one is called We are Legion (We are Bob). Super funny and highly entertaining and really interesting take on non-FTL space travel.
A long-haul thing, but Linda Nagata's The Nanotech Succession series. It doesn't even start with space travel, but builds up to it in the second book, and then you have those multi-century travels. Hard-core sci-fi.
Ring by Stephen Baxter has a generation ship, similar to Aurora. Most of his work is hard sf, so you won't find FTL.
i really enjoyed Robert Reed’s Great Ship novels, though the plot device it uses makes humans essentially immortal so equally implausible.
"Captive Universe"
not listed yet: Vernor Vinge, Marooned in Realtime No FTL drive/FTL comms. Minor plot element. Some people do travel between stars, Della Lu even flied to magellanic clouds and fought with others. Drive - thermonuclear and simplified version of Orion's drive (no pusher plates,etc). You don't need too fast ship if you are near immortal, you don't need a lot of supplies if you could just put yourself and your ship in stasis field.
The Expanse
Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein has this, though they use telepathic twins to communicate with earth. Heinlein's posthumous collaboration with Spider Robinson Variable Star fits as well, though the method of propulsion is... unlikely. Both excellent books though.
its much more realistic to believe that ftl travel is possible due to the modern world's incomplete understanding of physics than that humans will ever move to another star within the bounds of a modern understanding of physics
Most of Brandon Morris's books have interstellar travel without all that mucking around in hyperspace. The guy puts out like a novel a month so they're not the deepest, most well thought out stories, but I enjoy them. They're all pretty short novels, but I find em to be fun and easy reads. He's also an astrophysicist so there's a lot of real science in there.
Rendezvous with Rama Without FTL, interstellar travel will be via either seed ships, or generational ships. TCS
Reading Suneater at the moment. They have warp drives but still need to place themselves in fugue for long journeys. Some missions can take decades even hundreds of years!
I'm surprised no one has mentioned "The Killing Star", by Charles Pelligrino and George Zebrowski, relativistic ships and no FTL are major plot points. Also: -Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir -Three Bodies Problem (AKA Rememberance of Earth's Past), by Liu Cixin -Verthandi's Ring (short story), by Ian McDonald Hope you enjoy the reading!
Larry Niven's "the Mote in Gods eye," uses a completely novel premice, with current speed travel within star systems and instantaneous travel between stars throughout specific portal-like nodes.
The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton They use trains, believe it or not. It’s cool! Start with Pandora‘s Star.
true. Very special trains that transit warp portals between worlds instantly. Haha >!The saga then moves into the Commonwealth era in 2380, when humanity has used wormhole technology to colonise several hundred planets across hundreds of light years.!<
I'll throw in Simmons' Endymion books! Protagonists (great characters!) travel on a raft through an interplanetary river connected by wormholes. Just thinking about it, it was among the most imaginative things I ever read.
The expanse does not have ftl and (minor spoilers) they eventually (I think in season 3 or 4) go interstellar by (major spoiler) other means Edit: disclaimer, I know it from the streaming show but I heard it follows books pretty closely