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Faster-Than-Light Travel: Difference between revisions
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* Parodied, like most SF tropes, in ''[[Bill the Galactic Hero]]'' by [[Harry Harrison]], with the Bloater Drive which expands the ship to larger than galaxy sized, then shrinks it slightly off-center so that you coalesce a few lightyears from your starting point.
* In ''[[Hyperion]]'' they use a sort of wormholes to travel. Unfortunately making them work requires a sort of beacon to be built near any planet they will link to, so the people they send to build them are faced with the problems of relativity. Some time is spent exploring the implications of this technology, from houses that have rooms on a dozen planets and all their steps going downward ([[Alien Geometries|think about it]]) to riverboat rides across all the coolest places in the galaxy, to terrorists who destroy a beacon knowing that the army won't show up for decades and finally {{spoiler|mass suicides and starvation when the whole network fails}}. There are also spaceships that go faster than light, but they require the passengers to be put into "cryogenic fugue", and incur a lot of missed time on the traveler's part.
* David Brin's ''[[Uplift]]'' series uses pretty much all of the above in one form or another. The warp drives in the Uplift universe rely on altering probability. They also give the ship in question after-images, which
* Used in [[H. Beam Piper]]'s ''Terro-Human Future History'' novels. Hyperspace is very, very boring and a full interstellar jump takes weeks, meaning that pretty much everyone has a hobby to pass the time (such as music, landscape painting, or history). One line in ''Little Fuzzy'' implies that there is a bit of time dilation, although no actual time travel.
** [[Andre Norton]]'s ''[[Intrepid Merchant|Solar Queen]]'' series uses the same notion of crewmembers having hobbies. Some of those hobbies come in very useful in-story.
* Drives in [[The Sirantha Jax Series]] provide jumps through [[Subspace or Hyperspace|Grimspace]], which is a plane of psychedelia and flame which only the navigator (called a jumper) can chart courses through. An interesting facet of Grimspace is that a number of "buoys" were placed there to mark points where ships could jump back to normal space, but none know who put them there.
* ''Newton's Wake'' by [[Ken MacLeod]] features both a [[Portal Network|network of wormholes]] (called the Skein), and starships with warp drives (which are ridiculously expensive to build, but nonetheless possessed by every major galactic power). Both are based on technology left behind by super-human intelligences after a particularly violent [[The Singularity|technological singularity]]. The causality-violating properties of FTL are [[Hand Wave|hand waved]] away and later made into a plot point by having a character explicitly state that some incomprehensible cosmic laws simply ''prevent'' both the wormhole network and starships from ever being used to violate causality—if you plot a course or enter a wormhole that would let you travel into the past and change it, the FTL simply ''wouldn't work,'' or would take a longer route than seemingly necessary, or something else would occur to simply make the causality violation not happen.
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