The other day I decided to sit down and think about the different ways that science fiction has justified interplanetary travel. Usually finding habitable worlds is a task that can turn interplanetary travel into interstellar travel in a hurry. It seemed like a fun idea to put together a list of all of the ones that I could think of.
Here's hoping writers and game masters will find some useful food for thought in this one.
1. Faster than Light (FTL)
ex. Artemis Bridge Simulator
Real-space FTL travel might seem like the easy category; and I thought it'd be easier to find examples of stories where ships "just go that fast, get over it." but it turns out that pseudoscientific explanations are pretty fun to make. That being the case, "just going that fast" is actually fairly rare in well-known and well-received science fiction.
2. Jump
ex. Farscape (Starburst), Artemis Bridge Simulator
This is basically just a spaceship teleporting. Again, I thought it'd be a little more well-represented in the genre, but I had some trouble finding a lot of examples. I will say, though, that it adds a fun complexity to Artemis to play the game on jump mode. Official recommendation: jump drive mode on Artemis. Alright, moving on.
3. Otherspace
ex. Warhammer 40,000, Animorphs, Star Wars
Whether it's subspace, hyperspace, zero space, or the warp; it's the dimension next door and rapid transit is no issue, there. Sometimes this is explained as less restrictive physics, or that this otherspace is a small-scale duplicate of our own space. Travel an inch there, travel a light year here. Then just pop back into our reality when you get to that space's equivalent of your destination in our space. Nothing simpler, eh?
4. Generation Ship
ex. Quotzl, Wall-E
This is the Oregon trail of interstellar transit. Your family loads up and heads out, hoping that one day your great-great-grandchildren will be born on this ship, and live to see the new world you've headed towards.
5. Spatial Bending
ex. Star Trek
This is probably the background explanation for a lot of FTL. You can't go faster than light, but space can grow and/or shrink at whatever rate it likes. Now say you could induce space to grow just right that the place you're flying in were to be stretched to a place a hundred light years away. Now you've got it. Traveling quickly, don't be ridiculous. The simplest solution is to alter the shape of reality, obviously.
6. Wormhole Tunneling
ex. Farscape
Sometimes this also ties into Gate Transit (#8), but where Gate Transit might tether, or even create wormholes; wormhole tunneling is more a matter of mapping out the places where our three dimensional space naturally bends and meets through higher dimensions. Imagine that you could either fly to Russia, or go to an alley in Omaha that happens (via, let's just say, the sixth dimension) to be adjacent to a Moscow deli.
7. Relativistic Speed
ex. Ender's Game
Just because you can't go the speed of light, doesn't mean you can't take advantage of time dilation effects experienced when approaching the speed of light. In two-hundred years of travel, you could experience only a few years of time's passage in your own timeline. You do essentially guarantee that you'll never see the people you've left behind again, but that would have been an issue in generation ships, too.
8. Gate Transit
ex. Stargate, Cowboy Bebop, Mass Effect
It might be wormholes, otherspace, or teleportation; but what makes it Gate Transit is the gate. Maybe that's a literal opening, or it might be something like the mass relays. Either way, some piece of tech, networked into a system of similar tech can send you from "gate" to "gate", usually almost instantaneously.
9. Seed Ship
ex. Manseed
Like the generation ship, this ship doesn't really move faster than light, it just plans for a long haul. Unlike the generation ship, this isn't a flying colony, it's a flying fertility clinic. A ship heads off with the resources to breed and incubate new humans upon arrival. It protects the species, but memories of earth will fade pretty quickly.
10. Colonize a Better Space
ex. Firefly
Of course, any of these methods could be used to head for a solar system that's a little more tightly packed with habitable worlds. By the time your story starts, earth may be a distant memory, while interplanetary travel is just a week-long hop between nearby habitable worlds, moons, and asteroids. Massive terraforming in the Sol system might be another way to get the same effect.
11. Mental Projection
ex. The Shadow out of Time
This one's probably the oddest of all: aliens with powerful mental abilities capable of body-swapping through space, and perhaps even through time. This falls pretty far toward the sphere of weird science fiction, but the horror potential can make for some interesting storytelling.
Can you think of any methods I've missed? What's your favorite way of justifying this kind of space travel in science fiction?
Happy travels, all.
