If you can shrink space ahead of you and expand it behind, you can move locally under the speed of light, but on a very large scale travel FTL and move between stars in weeks or days. Miguel Alcubierre showed this in a paper in Quantum Gravity in 1994, using the tensor calculus applicable to general relativity theory. Unfortunately, the recipe requires matter of negative energy density, which we have no clue how to make and which may not exist. A 1997 study suggested that the amount of energy required made the whole thing impossible, but I believe a still later study found ways to cut the energy requirements severely. Still, that’s the basic idea. A “warp” drive.

There’s also the thought that you may be able to create a “wormhole” between different points in space, or even in time, and that you could traverse this thing very swiftly even if the end points were thousands of light-years distant. Again, though, you’d need exotic matter to stabilize each end.

Warping space to travel faster than light is apparently compatible with general relativity. But we have no practical idea of how to do it, and we may never.

On the other hand, it’s hard to write about interstellar contact and travel and relations between different intelligent species if you’re limited to the speed of light. Some SF writers have tried it, like Robert Silverberg and Vernor Vinge. But it makes the writing a heck of a lot easier if you stick in some kind of faster-than-light drive. Then other planets become other countries, and many more plots are possible.

I was a science fiction black hole… i loved it, rolled around in it, stayed up all night reading it, forgoing the pleasure of my then lovely (now) ex wife.

Then I started working hard on my degrees… there isn’t much good “science” fiction. Its all fantasy… Hard science fiction is dead.

All I have to read is “antimatter” and I groan… not one science fiction author has bothered characterising “antimatter”. I could have dealt with the magical powers of anti-carbon…

I realise now that the only science fiction books that I can deal with are the approach to mechanical or non human sentience or sci-fi humour.

Can someone please explain after 40 years how you can have warp drive ( I assume one warp is one c) and travel just a few weeks between vast sections of the galaxy?

At least Philip Jose Farmer’s disgraceful religious patronage makes damn sense, even if you are stuck with eternal dictators (and you believe his trite expansion into Sufism).

Sorry mate, I am not going to read another sci-fi book. It will probly be a wheel barrow load for the price of a good kitchen tool!

Afaedontism, pulp is pulp in the enduring abscesses of life!

Novel submissions to publishers and agents 1974-2008: 186.
Acceptances so far: 2.
Hit rate: 1/93.

Persistance, guys, persistance. Keep sending in those books, and sooner or later some first reader or editor or agent is going to slip up and let you in the gate.