Science fiction without FTL?

[Adam Reynolds]

How many science fiction stories have been told entirely without FTL of any sort(including communications*)? There are very few that come to mind for me. The two fairly recent examples I can think of off the top of my head are Revelation Space and The Expanse. A few older works also have other ideas as well, but few recent ones qualify. And hardly any of these are popular.

* In a sense, this is actually worse than FTL travel as it more readily leads to causality violations. The problem in a nutshell is that it is possible to send a signal to a distant point and reach that point before the act that initially caused the signal to be sent occurred. Consider a hypothetical bullet being fired at a distant planet(B). Planet B sees the bullet being fired(with sensors that see at the speed of light) and sends an FTL signal to Planet A. Because that signal travels faster than the light beam, it would actually travel to a point in the past, before Planet A fired. If A then refuses to fire, how would B have seen the bullet that caused them to send the signal in the first place? It creates the same grandfather paradox as time travel.

Even Avatar apparently used FTL comms, despite otherwise plausible space travel. I believe they used the spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement concept as a justification, as did Mass Effect. The problem with that idea is that while the information about corresponding states indeed travels faster than light, no usable information does. It's no different that sweeping a laser beam across a surface, while the tip of the beam can indeed travel faster than light in angular movement, it contains no usable information.

[biostem]

Well, every scifi movie or show that doesn't include spacetravel... The Matrix, Blade Runner, Terminator, etc.

[Adam Reynolds]

Sorry, what I meant was space opera settings. Or at least interstellar travel without FTL.

[Vendetta]

Neptune's Brood is a 'verse without any FTL. It's all lightspeed communication via comms laser with relatively slow physical transportation that not many people use (because "people" are actually all robots anyway, humans went extinct milennia ago, so their personalities can actually be transferred by comms laser and instantiated at the other end).

[jwl]

Several Greg Egan stories.
Several Kim Stanley Robinson stories
Several early solar system travel stories like hg well's first man in the moon.

[Grog]

Firefly

Edit: Ah sorry this has FTL communication, right?

[Batman]

Firefly
Edit: Ah sorry this has FTL communication, right?

I don't think they come out and say so, but for realtime interplanetary communcations they pretty much need it.

[Zeropoint]

I would mention the Eclipse Phase RPG setting, although it does have limited FTL comms and mysterious wormhole gates left behind by mysterious and frightening AI monstrosities. There's also no interstellar travel by humans (in ships, anyway).

[Adam Reynolds]

Firefly
Edit: Ah sorry this has FTL communication, right?

I don't think they come out and say so, but for realtime interplanetary communcations they pretty much need it.

I thought it wasn't fully real time as I recall they had to get close before using it. Though now that I think about it, the movie Serenity did feature real time comms regardless.

[Batman]

It's been a while since I saw the series but from what I recall they seemed to make transsytem calls with no visible comms delays.

[Q99]

The roleplaying game Transhuman Space comes to mind.

I wanted to say the Quantum Thief trilogy, but the Zoku quantum entanglement does seem to be a form of FTL comm.

---

Hm... you know, a soft SF universe with blasters and laser swords and all kinds of wacky tech, but no FTL, would be interesting. What if you had a solar system full of different soft-sf nations and such, all on lightspeed delay from each other...?

[Vendetta]

Hm... you know, a soft SF universe with blasters and laser swords and all kinds of wacky tech, but no FTL, would be interesting. What if you had a solar system full of different soft-sf nations and such, all on lightspeed delay from each other...?

So Gundam then?

[Broomstick]

Peter Watt's Blindsight has neither FTL travel nor communications. Granted, they don't leave the solar system, either, but they do get out towards Jupiter.

Early in Larry Niven's Known Space collection there is no FTL travel or communications.

There have been any number of stories and novels about generation ships.

[Batman]

There's also a lot of early Heinlein and Asimov, but I doubt they satisfy the space opera criterion.

[Typhonis 1]

Transhuman Space. Takes place in the Solar System in 2100 AD. No FTL communications or drives. Trips can take weeks or months.

[Q99]

Hm... you know, a soft SF universe with blasters and laser swords and all kinds of wacky tech, but no FTL, would be interesting. What if you had a solar system full of different soft-sf nations and such, all on lightspeed delay from each other...?

So Gundam then?

Oh, yes, that'd be an example!

[jwl]

The roleplaying game Transhuman Space comes to mind.

I wanted to say the Quantum Thief trilogy, but the Zoku quantum entanglement does seem to be a form of FTL comm.

---

Hm... you know, a soft SF universe with blasters and laser swords and all kinds of wacky tech, but no FTL, would be interesting. What if you had a solar system full of different soft-sf nations and such, all on lightspeed delay from each other...?

As I said, early sci-fi about solar system exploration. The First Men in the Moon is hardly hard sci-fi, the whole concept is based around a material that can block gravity, and the moon is covered with coloured vegetation.

[Zwinmar]

I can not remember who wrote it or anything but there was as story about a group of Traders who went from planet to planet on relativistic ships. One of its themes was how the characters interacted with a world that aged around them. One way to retire was to just stay planet side as their friends and family went out among the stars, when they came back the retiree would either be dead or extremely aged.

[Q99]

As I said, early sci-fi about solar system exploration. The First Men in the Moon is hardly hard sci-fi, the whole concept is based around a material that can block gravity, and the moon is covered with coloured vegetation.

Sure, but most of those don't have much setting building, and/or strongly resemble fantasy.

[Omeros]

I can not remember who wrote it or anything but there was as story about a group of Traders who went from planet to planet on relativistic ships. One of its themes was how the characters interacted with a world that aged around them. One way to retire was to just stay planet side as their friends and family went out among the stars, when they came back the retiree would either be dead or extremely aged.

Are you thinking of Ken MacLeod's Engines of Light series? It featured trading ships which teleported between star systems with what to the crews were instantaneous jumps, but to the outside world effectively travelled between destinations at the speed of light. Their visits to particular planets were often decades apart.

[The_Saint]

Tau Zero follows this idea...ish. Premise: colonisation spaceship accelerates to a high fraction of c to get to another planet with crew experiencing time dilation. Ship malfunctions and requires crew to continue to accelerate forcing the crew to deal with an obscenely high time dilation factor.
Ending gets a bit wonky and some of the maths has changed in the 45 years since it was written but it's an interesting premise.

I did once read a book which for the life of me can't remember the title but it involved a team of people on a research spacecraft travelling to the future via speed induced time dilation (spaceship journeys on a circular path through the galaxy accelerating and then decelerating such that the crew experiences a year at a time but the earth many decades. That book also went wonky after it had fleshed out all the 'science' and ended up with a final crew member genetically engineering an alien species to destroy the human race to teach it a lesson and then repopulating Earth after Big-crunch/big-bang

[Joun_Lord]

There's a new series on the SYFY Channel based on The Expanse books mentioned by the OP. It is a space series without FTL, dealing with pretty much the inner planets of the Solar System. Any extra-solar travel is described taking hundreds of years with the Mormons in the show building a generation ark to colonize another world.

A pretty good show and shows a interesting show can be made without FTL.

[Tsyroc]

Starhunter only took place in Earth's solar system.

It ran for two seasons in the early 2000s, but it looks like it might be coming back as Starhunter Transformation late next year. That's a little weird for a show that used to be on really late in syndication where I am.

If you watch it I think you might see some similarities to Firefly.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Between The Strokes of Night has no FTL, although the planet-bound cultures think the spacedwelling culture does. What they actually have is a treatment that drastically slows down the metabolism & subjective experience of time (and increases the subjective lifespan). So from their own perspective they are traveling FTL in ships traveling at 1 g, while in reality they are on low acceleration ships & barely moving.

Marooned in Realtime had no FTL; Della Lu traveled at STL between the stars before returning to Earth.

In the Belisarius series FTL is mentioned to be impossible, it took millions of years for future humanity and their descendants to colonize the Milky Way and its neighbors.

[Omega18]

Unless it actually had FTL communications and I don't remember, the Bio of a Space Tyrant series by Piers Anthony basically qualifies although they do invent FTL travel towards the very end of book five, although that part basically serves as an epilogue to the series. Its a series where until that point I believe everything was confined to basically the solar system (but a rather well colonized one).

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge also effectively qualifies. While its true that it takes place in the same universe as A Fire in the Deep which does have FTL and faster than light communications, the entire book and essentially past experiences of everyone and the civilizations in the book has occurred entirely in the "Slow Zone" part of the galaxy where FTL and faster than light communications don't work among other things. (And they have no idea that the rules are different in another part of the galaxy.) It also would be a better example of a significant focus on space based civilizations written by Vinge as opposed to Marooned in Realtime.

While not really space opera persay, with basically the exception of one plot detail which is technically speculation, the very recent Solar Express by L.E. Modesitt J.R. would qualify.

While solar system based, Manta's Gift by Timothy Zahn qualifies with an exception to the FTL travel rule showing up in actually fairly unexpected way at the very end of the book.

The Harry Turtledove Worldwar and Colonization series would both qualify with FTL travel not being invented until the very end of the 8th book Homeward Bound. (With no FTL communications at all. It should be noted though that especially the first series is focused on what if aliens invaded in the middle of WW2 versus actual space opera and the realism regarding how much trouble the aliens have certainly is a potential point of criticism, but the books do deal with some implications of no FTL travel or communications.)

While the other books in the series don't strictly qualify the book The Dispossessed by Ursula Guin does. The next novel chronologically in the series, The Word for World is Forest does occur right after the invention of purely FTL communications but does go into the implications of a expanding space bound civilization which previously didn't have this ability. (It also appears to be perhaps the mostly likely source of inspiration for Avatar's plot by the way. I would also suggest reading the book set later chronologically in the same universe in the Left Hand of Darkness just because its a good book, although I believe faster than light travel still doesn't exist in the book.)