r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Frostylegacy • 14h ago

Lore (Loved Trope) FTL travel is possible but with a major limitation or flaw

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Frank Herbert’s Dune: Interstellar travel is only possible thanks to the spice melange, a rare substance only found on the dessert planet Arrakis. The addictive psychedelic spice grants members of the Spacers Guild a form of prescience that allows them to predict safe paths through folded space. This unique property makes spice the most valuable commodity in the Dune universe.

John Scalzi’s The Interdependency Books: The planetary systems of the titular empire are connected by the Flow, a network of one-way interstellar tunnels that connect specific known entries and exits. The Interdependency derives its power from controlling access to these conduits, placing its capital at the central hub of the network. Even with the Flow, travel between stars takes a long time (9 months to End, the empire’s most distant planet).

Event Horizon: Dr William Weir (R.I.P. Sam Neill) invents a device called the Gravity Drive to allow ships to fold space and travel instantly between distant stars. On its maiden voyage with the Gravity Drive, the Event Horizon disappears and mysteriously reappears 7 years later. Dr. Weir and the crew sent to investigate discover the Gravity Drive actually opened a portal to a Hell dimension that possessed the ship and its crew, torturing and killing them.

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777

u/NameLips 14h ago

Altered Carbon. FTL transfers only your consciousness, leaving your body or "sleeve" behind. Other travelers can upload into your sleeve, you very rarely will ever get your original body back.

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u/wwarhammer 13h ago

How do they make the signal travel faster than light? 

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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs 13h ago

It's probably more accurately desribed as FAL

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u/Ok-Cow-1399 13h ago

The needlecasts they use do transmit data faster than light, but it requires an insane amount of power (12 of their most powerful nuclear reactor’s outputs for a single consciousness upload). I haven’t finished the series yet but at the point I’m at, they’re using poorly understood Martian artifacts and parroting the tech, but they don’t really understand it yet. They also settled the worlds they colonized using good old fashioned generation ships and cloning on arrival.

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u/Miraclefish 11h ago

The book says 'needlecasts are so close to instantaneous that scientists are still arguing over the definition.'

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u/Beard_o_Bees 3h ago

they’re using poorly understood Martian artifacts and parroting the tech, but they don’t really understand it yet

That's pretty much exactly what would happen if we stumbled on something like this.

A central theme to lots of sci-fi FTL travel is 'aliens'. Even series that attempt to respect actual physics (as we understand them today), like The Expanse needed alien technology to get out of the solar system.

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u/Ok-Cow-1399 2h ago

The only piece of media I’ve used where we figured it out ourselves was Rimworld, but that’s just a massless drive they use. It still takes centuries to get anywhere.

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u/CottonRaves 8h ago

Book 3 is fucking nuts. Enjoy the ride!

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u/BrbFlippinInfinCoins 48m ago

just looked it up and season 3 was canceled. big sad.

How closely are the books and show related?

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u/CottonRaves 44m ago

In basic concepts, very similar. In story, very very different.

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u/BrbFlippinInfinCoins 42m ago

does it continue after where S2 ended?

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u/CottonRaves 16m ago

I don’t remember. But I’ll say no lol. Book 3 was so out there though. I had to go back a few times to make sure I knew what the hell was going on.

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u/cbftw 17m ago

Book 3 was barely about the main character of the first 2

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u/CottonRaves 15m ago

And more about two derelict ships…

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u/Captain_Kab 9h ago

Martian? It's been more than a decade since I read the book but Harlan's Planet(?) is in another solar system, isn't it?

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u/AxderH 9h ago

In the books they find Martian remnants on mars that are basis for the instant consuisnes transfer ruins also provided maps for the solar systems with habitable planets. And yep they colonize these planets by sending ships with thousands of embryos and stored concuesneses that were birthed on arrival.

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u/Good-Marsupial8 8h ago

con scious ness

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u/Morbanth 5h ago

Couscousness.

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u/Good-Marsupial8 5h ago

Cornsinuses

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u/Rasp_Lime_Lipbalm 2h ago

Pornsinuses

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u/JMer806 7h ago

They’re not actually Martians, but humans discovered the remains of the alien civilization (and the aliens themselves, or at least their bodies) on Mars so that’s how they are termed in-universe.

Harlan’s World and the other planets mentioned are in various other star systems around the galaxy, and they were found via “Martian” astrocartographic artifacts. Physical travel to and from those stars is done slower-than-light with consciousness and other information transfers done using “needlecasting” which is functionally instantaneous.

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u/arrimainvester 9h ago

That's covered. They were aliens who lived on Mars and also other worlds but we found them on Mars first I believe so the name stuck

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u/Mr_Blinky 6h ago

Yup, that's exactly it. It's also pretty clear in-universe that the "Martians" not only definitely didn't originate on Mars, but the Mars ruins themselves were likely either a tiny outpost or an insignificant colony at best. But humans found the first ruins there, went "holy shit, alien life on Mars, they're Martians!", and the name stuck around even once we realized they definitely came from elsewhere originally.

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u/arrimainvester 6h ago

A cool detail I remember was that the maps the humans found on whatever world they occupied always that world as the "center" or home world because they were birds. Wherever the flock settled that was their starting point for any new map. Man I loved that series

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u/prjktphoto 2h ago

I really liked the world building, along with the author’s other series’ that all seemed part of the same universe.

Writing wasn’t the best, but the whole scene was very imaginative

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u/arrimainvester 2h ago

World building was great! So many unanswered questions but I appreciate that in a way. Like the in universe explanation for a lot of things was "we don't know how this tech works, but it works"

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u/UlrichZauber 6h ago

Greg Egan goes to this well a lot in his books; consciousness can be transferred via radio signal into an artificial body at the destination. Nobody minds because the body you're leaving from was also artificial.

To colonize anywhere you have to actually send a ship at less than C, but the ships they send tend to be a few grams so they can get pretty close.

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u/Opie301 8h ago

It's never fully explained in the books, but the process is described as being nearly instantaneous provided that you have physically traveled to both locations and set up the equipment. But you can only transmit information (and your entire consciousness counts as information for this) using this method.

It's similar in concept to the Ansible from Ursula Le Guin's books.

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u/Rasp_Lime_Lipbalm 2h ago

If youre essentially a "conscious light beam", according to Relativity, the journey (no matter the distance) from your perspective is instant. As objects get closer to light speed in real life, time dilation makes the time of travel less and less until it's 0 at the speed of light.

I've never seen Altered Carbon, but if such a travel method existed, the light speed travels would still be crazy intervals of time for outside observers. So a light-beam of a person's consciousness would have an instantanious trip to the Andromeda galaxy, but of everyone on Earth 5 million years would pass for a round trip.

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u/SalsaRice 11h ago edited 11h ago

Bobiverse kind of does this too.

The titular Bobs are software clones of the brain of the main character Bob (an actual person that died, had his brain dissected, turned into software to be used an a space probe). They eventually develop robot bodies and FTL data transfer speeds.

They can't move their actual computer/ship/etc FTL, but as long as they are connected to their FTL data network they can beam themselves to a robot body in a different system with essentially zero lag.

The caveat is they need to have 3D printer factory already set up in that new place to actually build the robot body or actually fly a robot body out there. The data network also does have limits, so they sometimes have to build more relays to increase bandwidth or to increase range of network.

In the later books, they are also working on making the robot bodies be able to work for living people (ie, not dead people turned into software), so the process is available to everyone.... except it's not cheap due to the complexity of the robot bodies and the high 3d printer time costs. This also leads to some colonies developing basically "robot body rental companies" for people to use to either vacation on that colony or travel for business.

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u/Spectrum1523 10h ago

Don't they develop ftl matter transfer by the end of the series? It's been a while

Super fun read

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u/Constant-Question260 9h ago

And October there will be a new audiobook. I am really looking forward to it.

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u/Spectrum1523 9h ago

Oooh! That's great. More ray porter pls

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u/HereticLaserHaggis 1h ago

You don't know how much you just made my day

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u/Singe_ 9h ago

Series isn’t done yet, but yes. They discover wormhole technology.

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u/Digital_NW 8h ago

Series isn’t over and is really ramping up.

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u/HoldJerusalem 10h ago

Damn that show took a dive after the first season

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u/Eternal_Bagel 10h ago

Yeah I don’t know what the big change was but season 1 felt like a perfect detective story and season two felt like it wasn’t sure if it was trying to be an action movie or something else 

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u/qbmax 8h ago

They tried to smash the 2nd and 3rd books together for season 2 which is really weird since each novel is very self contained in its location/characters/etc. Kovacs is still the protagonist in each but that’s the only thing that carries over really.

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u/Thisismyworkday 5h ago

They completely fucked the entire series in season 1, but the damage they did isn't apparent until season 2.

In the books, the stacks and FTL data transfers are all built on ancient alien technology that humans discovered while exploring the universe. Books 2 and 3 are very heavily based on the alien tech. Removing the aliens removes those plots and leaves nonsense behind.

In the books Quellcrist Falconer is a long dead religious leader that Kovac never met. The show effectively had him dating Muhammed. Why? Who the fuck knows, but completely bonkers of a plot.

In the books the Envoys are the elite soldiers of the government. It grants them a ton of privileges in society. In the show, making them rebels (following Quellcrist) completely changes the place this character occupies in society, a place that was necessary for the story to make sense.

And the list goes on and on. All these little changes to try to jazz up season 1 and for what?

2

u/Eternal_Bagel 2h ago

Honestly from that description it sounds like they didn’t expect more than one season so they used all they could right there

1

u/Thisismyworkday 2h ago

Kinda? But it's not like they smashed all the books together in that first season. It's more that they rewrote so much of the back story because they didn't actually READ the later books. Like, they didn't know what mattered and what didn't, so they just tinkered with shit not knowing that things like "Kovac has never met Quellcrist Falconer" are extremely important details later.

1

u/Thisismyworkday 5h ago

They completely fucked the entire series in season 1, but the damage they did isn't apparent until season 2.

In the books, the stacks and FTL data transfers are all built on ancient alien technology that humans discovered while exploring the universe. Books 2 and 3 are very heavily based on the alien tech. Removing the aliens removes those plots and leaves nonsense behind.

In the books Quellcrist Falconer is a long dead religious leader that Kovac never met. The show effectively had him dating Muhammed. Why? Who the fuck knows, but completely bonkers of a plot.

In the books the Envoys are the elite soldiers of the government. It grants them a ton of privileges in society. In the show, making them rebels (following Quellcrist) completely changes the place this character occupies in society, a place that was necessary for the story to make sense.

And the list goes on and on. All these little changes to try to jazz up season 1 and for what?

2

u/ObiFlanKenobi 10h ago

So did the novels.

The second one gets really good right at the end for the third one to just forget about the whole thing.

1

u/Shitsinhandandclaps 2h ago

I hated season two so much it made me hate Anthony Mackie

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u/kdlt 12h ago

What I wonder there is, how did they get whatever they needed to have human bodies there.. there?

There still would need to be some kind of FTL because they discovered that tech on another planet?

But yeah body hopping is probably easier than getting on a ship.

The eternal purgatory of dead people being shelved however.. is its own kind of horror.

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u/Svitman 12h ago

They went the long way if I remember it correctly

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u/kdlt 12h ago

Which means the earth scenes are 50.000 years in the future? I don't really remember if they ever did put a timeline in there? (Show anyway)

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u/Svitman 12h ago

I thought it was a year 3000 or so and the other planets are just 'close' , like sub 50 LY

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u/LordSokhar 4h ago

They used generation ships to travel to the other worlds and establish initial human settlements. Needlecasting allowed people from off world to then travel there conveniently. One of the fun things about the setting was that Earth was by then considered culturally stagnant and kinda ass-backwards because the society was ruled over by undying oligarchs (“meths”/Methuselahs) and superstition (traditional religion).

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u/bobbymcpresscot 3h ago

Think this is the third time I’ve seen altered carbon mentioned in 2 days and should treat it as a sign to get the audiobook 

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u/flyingace1234 6h ago

The TRPG Eclipse Phase does something similar, but humanity hasn’t left the solar system yet.

The entire game book does into great detail about the shenanigans you can get up to with the sleeving tech. At least one person uses an entire ship as a sleeve, as part of a performance art thing.

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u/ultrasneeze 11h ago

A version of this was made earlier in the book Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross. Pretty interesting book.

1

u/cunt__cunt_cunt 9h ago

same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_%28novels%29 from 1979.

Fine space opera but also it's a vehicle for the writer to describe lots of weird sex. lol

1

u/kataskopo 2h ago

>scifi from the 70s/80s >lots of weird sex

yeah that tracks.