SF Stories That Cut the Vastness of Space Down to Size

[james_davis_nicoll]

SF Stories That Cut the Vastness of Space Down to Size

Comments

[petrea_mitchell]

One thing I loved about Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained was the author's realization that, once you have convenient wormhole portal technology, there's no need for any of that tedious mucking about with spaceships at all, except for exploratory missions. One simply gets on a train, because the portals are conveniently set up at planetary surface level.

(At least that's the only instance I know of. I can name two other works using trains for interstellar travel: Galaxy Railways and Timothy Zahn's Quadrail series. But IIRC both of those require people to first get into space before using the trains.)

[austin_dern]

Now I'm envisioning a setting where the ancient aliens left behind a galaxy-spanning portal network of unimaginable complexity. But they did go through and document it, and left several copies of the documentation at every portal ingress and egress. It's just the documentation is also of unimaginable complexity. Our hero is a plucky young grad student who thinks she might be the first person to understand the ``Structure Of This Design Document'' all at once.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

I don't know if there's enough of the type to make categorizing them in your lexicon worthwhile: What about stories like Masters of the Maze? travel is restricted, but OTOH, it's not instantaneous either; you have to traverse a path.

An aside: I'm surprised no one mentioned the Telzey Amberdon novel The Lion Game wherein most of the story takes place in a networked cluster of disconnected rooms.