Whether the hyperspaceĭrive of Asimov in the 40s or the warp drive of Star Trek and mostĮlse in between, travel at faster than light speeds has been more ofĪn assumption than a challenge in a genre which is supposed to engage Repealed Einstein without much of a hearing. The result has been a science fiction that by and large has Science, at least insofar as these might pertain to speed of Of Popper, or indeed sophisticated discussions of philosophy of But not many science fiction writers seem aware Should have little trouble amending Einstein much the same asĮinstein amended Newton. Scientific theories are nonetheless highly fallible and destined forįalsification - as Einstein himself did - then fiction writers If we agree with the philosopher Karl Popper that even the best corroborated Super-luminary travel on scientific or philosophic of science terms. One approach might be to contest Einstein's proscriptions on So how, then, is science fiction to writeĪbout human relations across star systems and galaxies in human time Theory of general relativity insists that objects attain infinite Light speeds is flatly impossible, and the slightly more lenient But according toĮinstein's theory of special relativity, movement at faster than įaster than light travel has been one of the most intriguing andįrustrating challenges of science fiction, which generallyĭistinguishes itself from fantasy by writing about technologies andĮvents that are at least scientifically plausible.
And then there's Redshift Rendezvous, in some ways even truer to the hybrid ideal.
Isaac Asimov's robot stories (in contrast to his faster-than-light ships in space) are a good example. People often ask me to name a science fiction/ mystery hybrid that really works. To start, here's my 1992 review, published in the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, of John Stith's Redshift Rendezvous (Ace, 1990, 256 pp.), now available on Kindle. I thought it was time to begin putting these reviews up on this blog, one or two a month, right alongside the more numerous reviews of television series. I've published dozens of reviews of science fiction novels by well-known and little-known authors in the past few decades, in the New York Review of Science Fiction, Tangent, the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, and other places.
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