Another interesting take on FTL travel appeared in Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky, where is was accepted that FTL travel also implied time travel (for the usual reasons involving lightcone shenanigans), which in turn permitted temporal paradoxes of various sorts.
The inherent paradoxes were (mostly)? prevented by something one of the characters described by “semi-divine fiat,” as in, the temporal coherence of history was enforced by
a superintelligence carefully passing messages back in time to earlier versions of itself and then preemptively ruining your day by
having your planet “coincidentally” bitten to death by killer asteroids right before you tried to violate causality.
The book was partially inspired by Moravec’s models of “closed time-like curves.” It’s a surprisingly fun bit of older SF that at least accepts that FTL has weird consequences if you try to take the physics even semi-seriously.
Another interesting take on FTL travel appeared in Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky, where is was accepted that FTL travel also implied time travel (for the usual reasons involving lightcone shenanigans), which in turn permitted temporal paradoxes of various sorts.
The inherent paradoxes were (mostly)? prevented by something one of the characters described by “semi-divine fiat,” as in, the temporal coherence of history was enforced by
a superintelligence carefully passing messages back in time to earlier versions of itself and then preemptively ruining your day by
having your planet “coincidentally” bitten to death by killer asteroids right before you tried to violate causality.
The book was partially inspired by Moravec’s models of “closed time-like curves.” It’s a surprisingly fun bit of older SF that at least accepts that FTL has weird consequences if you try to take the physics even semi-seriously.