It’s interesting to see the way hard science fiction writers have largely retreated from star travel, finally wising up to how dubious is the notion of faster-than-light space ships and cryogenic suspension for travel to distant stars with habitable planets.
Mercifully they’ve also backed away from the we’re-all-going-to-hell ecosystem destruction tales of the past decade or so. The ones that touted global warming look particularly stupid as there hasn’t been any warming for seventeen years now.
Instead, they’ve turned to a more optimistic, more plausible tomorrow by far, near-future development of towns and cities on (and under) the moon and Mars and far-future expansion into the asteroid belt and the icy moons of Jupiter, and Saturn. Even, eventually, into the outer dark of the Kuiper Belt.
The travel problem, of course, gets harder the further out, so to speak, their stories go, from the days it takes chemical rockets to get to the moon and the months to travel to Mars to the years to fly to Jupiter and beyond.
Ion engines are slow but available and fission rockets are fastest, of course, and so they’re dreaming of assembling them in Earth orbit where there’s plenty solar radiation now, and beyond the reach of the First Church of Environmentalism, but they’re also daydreaming of fusion propulsion which is a lot more plausible than physics-busting faster-than-light.
It’s a refreshing change and if you like science fiction you need to hunt down some of these new tales which are a lot more believable ( and a lot more fun to imagine) than the old ones. Cool as they could be sometimes.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 