And yes, I know Firefly did it. But they kinda cheated by postulating an extended multiple-star system with scores of inhabitable worlds and moons. I guess what I mean is, could a series that accepted that interstellar travel took years or decades be done?
I suppose it would have to center on a spaceship that traveled between the stars at relativistic velocity, so it’s crew only experienced months while stationary systems experienced decades. A key point would have to be that once the ship left system, it could only return decades or centuries later. Conversely, people who had vanished into space even lifetimes ago could still be out there somewhere.
Here’s one possible premise: a peaceful system was attacked and ravaged by a fleet of interstellar raiders/conquerers. The attack was beaten off but left billions dead and worlds devastated. A call goes out for volunteers to track down and destroy the marauders, knowing that the crew or crews are effectively choosing irrevocable exile. A large powerful warship (or a small fleet) is dispatched on a millenia-long interstellar quest.
You could borrow a page from the original Star Trek and have the weekly “visit to a strange society” theme. You could have worlds or systems that consider the questors the dangerous invaders. You could have debates over the wisdom of pursuing a vendetta long after the original offense is ancient history. And you could even have it ironically turn out that the questors would end up developing a ship-based society with more in common with the pirates they’re hunting than the world they left behind.
And, of course, the original Battlestar Galactica was a variant on the idea of fleets of people in space away from their home world. Though I can’t at all remember if BG had FTL - I don’t think it did.
Anything taking place in a single solar system certainly. I’m working on one where Humans have only made it as far as Jupiter. The protagonist finds himself wanting to be the hegemon of Saturn. The ideas of space travel follow a pattern similar to European colonialism where it took months or years to travel from place to place. There is also a theory I read about gravity wells that are created between planets that can accelerate the speed of a ship greatly, kind of like a jetstream between planets.
If you want interstellar, generation ships are cool and the idea that they only can communicate with each other by encoding messages into beams of light is neat.
If you wanted to be truly realistic, you’d need to either cut forward 5 years for each trip to anywhere or accept that your show was about people confined in a single, small habitat–which really makes the “outerspace” angle a bit meaningless.
Firefly didn’t have FTL, the whole show and movie occurred in a multiple star system, the original colonists had reached it with cryoships.
The Alien series also didn’t have FTL, I believe.
Any story set either solely on another planet or within one system can do fine without FTL.
It would have to take place inside a solar system or on a generation ship. Otherwise travel between systems would take years at best.
One idea would be for a generation ship to have landed on a world already populated with a sentient species. The humans would try to fit in and find a role in an already functioning society. Kind of like Alien Nation in reverse.
Orson Scott Card’s Enderverse didn’t have FTL travel until near the end of Xenocide. They did have instant communications, though. Is that ruled out with your premise?
OSC’s Homecoming series didn’t have FTL travel or communications, but it also didn’t have much to do with space travel as such.
I presume the existence of high-sublight (relativistic) travel. So no, the people onboard ship don’t need hibernation or generation ships. Think The Forever War (which actually could be another show premise).
A lot of Larry Niven’s Known Space stories take place without FTL travel. Even much of the Man-Kzin Wars, between multiple solar systems, takes place at sublight speeds.
They apparently had FTL travel but generally didn’t use it. At one point during the show, Adama portentously announced that the Galactica was going to go to light-speed to deal with some crisis. Apollo was shocked and pointed out that many of the ships in the fleet couldn’t do light-speed and would be left behind.
Yes, I know, the idea that the fleet was not regularly traveling at FTL speed makes no sense. A lot of SF TV and movies are written by people who are ignorant of even the basics of science.
L. Sprague de Camp’s Viagens Interplanetarias series didn’t have interstellar travel, but went to the nearer stars the slow way. I believe de Camp didn’t believe in FTL travel, and refused to put it in any of his stories.
If the cast were sentient (or not?) androids, they could just go into “cybersleep,” while they make a thousand year journey to another star system. “One Thousand Two Hundred Thirty Four Years Later…” and so on.
Between the Strokes of Night had an idea I thought was neat. The interstellar travellers had a process that drastically slowed their perceptions and metabolism. They didn’t actually go into suspended animation; they were conscious the whole way. They didn’t have FTL, but they perceived themselves as effectively travelling FTL because there were living so very slowly. Their ship has low but continuous thrust, to simulate normal gravity from their viewpoint. And they were served by robots which operated at speeds we would look at as slow - which to them was too fast to see. They could, say, ask for a table and chairs, and the robots would haul them in and set them up - but to the travellers, it just looks like the table and chairs appear.
In general, I find that non-FTL science fiction can be very good at producing a grand scale, cosmic feel to the story. When it takes over a million years to reach the next galaxy, and you know that your species outside of your own expedition has now been extinct for longer than humans have existed when you reach your destination; that produces a sense of scale hard to achieve in universes with FTL.
They had to as most of the films take place outside the solar system. They just never show the Nostromo or the Sulako “warping” or “jumping into hyperspace” or any such thing. If the Nostromo was traveling FTL in Alien, it does it without the spectacular light show and we only see the Sulako in orbit.
Presumably, even at FTL, it takes a long time to travel between stars (days or weeks, maybe even months) hense the cryo-whatchamabobs.
The problem with any interstellar SF story at less than FTL speeds is that it would take decades, centuries or millenia to make a round trip and there is no practical purpose for such a trip. Think of a FTL Roman Empire space ship leaving 2000 years ago and coming back tomorrow. What possible purpose could that trip have served anyone? Fight a war for an empire than no longer exists? Gather resources for out of date technologies? Deliver packages to the decendents of colonists from a thousand years ago?
You only need to change one condition to give non-FTL travels on a greater scale purpose: life span. If the average one were around three or four hundred years most of the stars visible in the sky could be considered our neighborhood (if non-FTL drives reached a speed relatively close to lightspeed).
A series that tried to envision a society consisting of long-living humans (or a class of them among not so long living ones) would already be interesting on its own – and, just for once, we might actually watch Science Fiction and not technobabble fantasy.
That would be the Theory of Relativity. Your perception of time is much slower as you approach the speed o’ light. For the traveler a few days may pass but to the rest of the universe it would have been much longer.
The best SF show without FTL travel is Star Cops. No FTL or time travel or any shortcuts. When the characters were in space, there was usually no gravity. If your rockets fired out their fuel and sent you on a course for the stars, there was no way for anyone to reach you before you ran out of air.