Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories

[james_davis_nicoll]

Plenty of exciting hypotheses eventually fall out of scientific favor — but not before they've found their way into science fiction!

Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories

Comments

[scott_sanford]

Any writer who has used wormholes as a way of getting around the Universe...

Honorable mention to Greg Egan's Diaspora, in which some very smart characters[1] spend a lot of time and resources constructing some traversable wormholes only to discover they're not worth the effort.

[1] Greg Egan doesn't write any non-smart characters, only smart or mathematically brilliant characters.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think Greg Egan has ever used FTL in any story. He even has a story where explorers on an alien planet have to make up a fake method of interstellar travel, and even that is slower than light.

[patrick_morris_miller]

He did write a story involving sending signals backwards in time, which is kissin' cousins to FTL.

[(Anonymous)]

Technically the ship in the Orthogonal series travels faster than light, but since the whole story is set in a universe designed entirely around having no lightspeed limit, I'm not sure it counts. There's not even a single "speed of light" there.

[scott_sanford]

The flight plan in Orthogonal is more like a relativistic journey, except that in that universe the "relativity" works very, very differently.