Faster than Light Travel (FTL)

The distance between stars, and even planets, is absurdly massive, making stories involving visiting multiple galactic locations difficult to tell. The FTL drive allows a story to take place on galactic scales in a reasonable amount of time.

Examples

• 1966 Rocannon's World

  Humans cannot travel faster than light, but probes can. The League of All Worlds sends an orbital strike via a probe after learning about the invasion of Rocannon's World.

• 1967 Flatlander

  Slower than Infinity has an FTL drive which can only operate far from gravity centers, and also does not affect normal space momentum. Thus, to bleed off a high momentum, ST∞ must decelerate as it passes through a solar system, then use the hyperdrive to navigate around the star's gravity well, dropping back into normal space at their original entry point to continue their velocity-matching burn.

• 1970 Ringworld

  Faster than light drives are common among the species in the Ringworld universe. The reward offered by Nessus for his Ringworld exploration team is a ship called the Long Shot, which has a much faster FTL drive than any other known.

• 2018 FTL, Y'all!

  The premise of this anthology is accessible faster than light technology.