Mildly amusing idea

[james_davis_nicoll]

(Inspired by a recent post in rasfs, in which someone's wormhole network links the interior of stars)

As in books like Galactic Derelict and Gateway, humanity stumbles over a long abandoned transportation network that offers the possibility of extremely fast access to the stars. Unfortunately the builders were very alien. They weren't even at the right temperatures for chemistry to be a factor. Conditions that were shirt-sleeve for them are like dancing naked in a blast furnace for us. The two species have very different criteria by which they judge interestingness for network nodes.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

This could be a very short story if the gateways link to areas where, say, the physics precipitates BECs naturally.

"They opened the gateway. There was a great sucking noise, then everywhere in the universe -- silence. THE END."

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Dave Duncan's Strings has a system for opening what are effectively short-lived wormholes to other places. They tend to connect us to the hearts of stars, which has done the power-generation industry no end of good. Luckily for Earth, they are not such that the Earth is drawn in through the hole, nor can much of the star escape or the book would have been much shorter.