Hard science-fiction: Breaking causality?

[shashekar]

Indulge me, but I've been beavering away for some time on a (hopefully) hard science fiction. Many elements of the story are still fluid as I am working on it in many fragmented pieces, so I'm not even going to try to give a synopsis here. However, the climax revolves around the revelation that the protagonists hold a faster-than-light drive, both allowing them to escape from a precarious situation and and leading to a much-changed situation among humanity as a whole.

Here are my questions about such a situation:

Is the introduction of such a situation a deus ex machina or a valid way to forward the story? "Oh no, they're shooting at us and we're going to die...but wait, we have this faster than light drive!"

I hope for this story to be completely hard science fiction, and I'm worried that introducing such a non-hard element might dilute the impact of the rest of the story. For sure, using the drive isn't as simple as pushing a few buttons; indeed, a great deal of effort is involved in its operations. Will it have this effect?

As a (couch) student of physics I'm wrestling with the idea of breaking relativity by being able to transmit information - in any form - faster than light, and from a real-world viewpoint, allowing information to be sent from the future. Am I better off just sweeping these kind of considerations under the carpet?

Thankee!

 

[kmtolan]

Yeah, it's going to be hard to avoid a deus ex machina scenario. You might try and focus your story more on the characters and events surrounding the striving for an FTL drive and let its existence be a given from the start. Perhaps a secret that turns into astonishing fact, but all along its about what people are doing about the technology rather than the technology itself. Lot of hard SF tends to focus on the people and how technology affects them. Might try that sort of angle.

Just a few thoughts of mine on the matter. Not a lot of hard SF being written these days, so I'm cheering for you.

Kerry

 

[shashekar]

Yeah, it's going to be hard to avoid a deus ex machina scenario. You might try and focus your story more on the characters and events surrounding the striving for an FTL drive and let its existence be a given from the start. Perhaps a secret that turns into astonishing fact, but all along its about what people are doing about the technology rather than the technology itself. Lot of hard SF tends to focus on the people and how technology affects them. Might try that sort of angle.

Just a few thoughts of mine on the matter. Not a lot of hard SF being written these days, so I'm cheering for you.

Kerry

Thank you for the reply. The bulk of technology I plan to include is from tomorrow, proverbially speaking. Even the FTL drive is known the protagonists as a form of un-jammable radio (''it transmits information,'' but they aren't told just how it does that. Heh). But beyond that the story is about a journey and the people undertaking it. And the people trying to kill them, muahahahaha.

 

[goldhawk]

In order for a breakthrough not to be a deus ex machina you would have to show someone struggling with it throughout the story. That way, when it finally works, it does not appear to come from out of the blue.

As for breaking the hard science: what if they escape simply by improving their current engines? For example, going from a gasoline engine at 23% to an electric one at 88%, could give them a speed advantage with which to escape.

 

[shashekar]

It really wouldn't work because their pursuers have two advantages: The pursuer ship is a courier/warship with vastly superior engines (it allows their unexpected arrival), and it carries missile magazines. All they have to do is wait for the protagonists to accelerate as hard as they can, then accelerate a little bit faster and launch their missiles. This situation is actually my climax. The protagonists have a choice of trying to outrun an incoming missile or cut thrust and use the power for their FTL drive.

 

[KatG]

It's not fair, is it -- all the old hard sf authors got to use FTL drives willy-nilly, even after it started looking more unlikely, and warp holes, etc., as the means to write about space travel, but now the same SF fans who love them claim the new authors can't do it anymore if they want to be seen as hard SF.

Or some of them do. That's the problem, there isn't a definitive answer on this. You could use stone cold hard proven science of some kind and some fans will still tell you it's a deus ex machina. Quantum theory is still in there swinging on the FTL, even though relativity is holding up and the two arenas are getting more merged as they go.

It sounds like you have a handle on a lot of the science, so read as much as you can about FTL, spaceship design, the particle accelerator, etc., and then just work out as plausible a line as you can, with either FTL or near-FTL. Whether that will allow you to be seen as hard SF or not, I really can't tell you as there is no longer consensus. (It used to be that you just had to make strong use of the hard sciences and you were in.) But if the story is strong and appeals to some, the worse is that you'll get called space opera with a hard SF edge, and hey, that's doing well now.

 

[shashekar]

I'll go ahead with the introducing the FTL from the beginning of the story. I already have a framework in place to handle the real physics and practicalities involved in realizing the spaceship designs. I'd tell you that I have an embarrassing amount of spreadsheets created, but I'm an unashamed geek.

Eh, the FTL is a sore thumb, but it's there to stay. I'll introduce it much earlier in the story and explain its functioning off mumblings about brane theory...