Walking Faster Than We Can Talk
How a simple premise can create a science fiction world
In most science fiction, if the universe permits faster-than-light travel, it permits faster-than-light communication.
In Star Trek, the starships travel around the galaxy at warp speed and use “subspace radio” to communicate faster than light. And though there were some efforts to impose limits on that communication (in “The Enterprise Incident,” a Romulan official notes that subspace communication would take three weeks to reach Starfleet Command from the Neutral Zone), those limits were frequently disregarded in the interests of plot pacing and narration.
In Star Wars, even less attention is paid to the speed of communication than to the speed of the hyperdrive engines that allow the ships of that universe to cross vast distances without any real trouble.
In more serious science fiction, the problem of speed-of-light communications is usually solved with ansibles or some other technology that can skip over the inconvenient light-years between star systems.
The Expanse does pay attention to the distance of communications, but The Expanse is frequently the exception that proves the rule.
Slow Talking
But what if communications weren’t as easy a problem to solve as travel? What if a civilization had solved faster-than-light travel but not faster-than-light communications? What would such a world look like?
It was that simple thought experiment that led to the writing of Delivering the Commonwealth: the idea that a civilization might outgrow its ability to communicate with its farthest-flung reaches.
In the universe of Delivering the Commonwealth, humanity has developed a hyperdrive that allows starships to travel between the stars (for a hefty price in antimatter) but must still rely on radio or line-of-sight laser communications. Communication among star systems is facilitated by a kind of courier service—hyperspace drones jump from one system to the next, picking up outgoing messages and broadcasting incoming ones. Such a method ensures that there are delays in messages reaching their destination—the time it takes the signal to reach the communications hub, the time in between departures of the hyperspace drones, and the number of adjoining systems that must be crossed for the message to reach its destination.
Among the planets of the League of Four Worlds, three adjacent solar systems rely on such messenger drones to facilitate their communications over a total span of seven light-years. From one end of the League to the next, a message might take two days to reach its destination—hardly the instantaneous communications of the United Federation of Planets or the Galactic Empire.
Fast Walking
In Delivering the Commonwealth, the League of Four Worlds, where the story begins, has been cut off from the rest of humanity for four centuries because the founders of their worlds traveled farther than communications could be maintained.
Early on in their expedition, those Pioneers decided to search for already-habitable planets rather than find candidates for terraforming. They traveled further and further away from the boundaries of the Commonwealth of Humanity until they found four habitable worlds in three adjacent star systems.
They never worried that they had traveled too far—they anticipated that ships from the Commonwealth would follow the trail of marker buoys they had left behind. Eventually, communications and commerce with the rest of the Commonwealth would be established.
But ships from the Commonwealth never arrived, and the four colony worlds lacked the resources to make a return journey. And given that a radio or laser signal would take over 1400 years for a round trip, they were now effectively cut off from any contact with their home worlds—they were on their own.
This situation would be like one in which the Jamestown colonists had set up their colony on an uninhabited American continent and then never heard from England again and couldn’t afford to make the return trip. It wouldn’t be the colony that had gone missing, but the motherland.
The Dilemma
In Delivering the Commonwealth, the League of Four Worlds is suddenly attacked by a hostile alien intelligence against whom they are completely defenseless. The alien ships’ hulls are indestructible, and their weapons are devastating. Mercifully, the aliens do not seem to have faster-than-light drive—the League has time before the invaders will be in the next system.
Knowing that they cannot simply call for help, they have only one option—a desperate journey seven hundred light-years back to the last known boundaries of the Commonwealth and enlist its aid against the alien invaders.
Given the rules of this universe, the separation in time and distance between the Commonwealth and the League means that our protagonists know almost nothing about what they will find. This inability to communicate makes for much of the dilemma in the novel: the League must mount a costly expedition, but does the Commonwealth still exist? And if it does, are they willing to help? And if so, are they able to help? What if they travel all that way, and the answer to any of those questions is “no”?
In our world, we can communicate much faster than we can travel, and there are plenty of opportunities for drama. It is exciting to flip the rules around and discover a whole new set of dilemmas and obstacles for your protagonists to overcome.
Learn more about the story and the world of Delivering the Commonwealth.
