From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written

On 9/9/2025 5:23 PM, William Hyde wrote:

Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 9/8/2025 12:18 PM, James Nicoll wrote:

Five Books That Just Said To Hell With the Speed-of-Light Barrier


What, aside from the overwhelming weight of evidence, suggests
Einstein was right?


https://reactormag.com/five-books-that-just-said-to-hell-with-the-
speed-of-light-barrier/

I have read "The Skylark Of Space" and the wonderful "Citizen Of The
Galaxy".

While SF that observes the light speed limit can be great, I also have a great love for many works that zip past light speed without so much as a wave in Einstein's direction.-a Just don't embarrass yourself babbling inanely about something you don't understand, but which some readers might.

I do admire the way Charles Stross does tackle some of the problems of
FTL, but I'm not going to demand that every writer who uses FTL peruse
Judea Pearl's "Causality", before setting fingers to keyboard.

I'm here for the stories.-a If I want the science, I have to shamefacedly confess that I never did finish Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's
"Gravitation" (close but not close enough).

The book stares at me from a nearby shelf.-a Accusingly.-a Good thing I never bought "Causality".

I am reminded of what people said would happen when we exceeded the
speed of sound.-a Heinlein simply applied the same logic to exceeding
the speed of light in COTG.

That's a terrible insult to Heinlein and to engineers in-a general.-a And
to the word, "logic".

Remember, Andy Libby in "Methuselah's Children" is an absolute genius at physics and mathematics who does not have a first-year physics student's understanding of special relativity.-a Taking that passage out would significantly improve the book for me.

Still, aside from Milton Rothman (Lee Gregor), John Pierce (JJ Coupling)
and perhaps Arthur Clarke, few Astounding readers would have known how
silly this passage is, so RAH was safe enough writing it.

RAH didn't understand SR.-a Certainly he could have, but he didn't want to.

William Hyde

BTW, I believe that John Varley was the first author to explore what
would happen should someone take a spaceship out from Earth, turn
around, accelerate to 0.99999999999 SPEOL, and hit the Earth. Very
sobering and highly recommended. "Red Lightning (Red Thunder)"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441013643

Varley did put in a FTL translation machine (teleportation) of that
series in book #4 but, he did it gracefully.

Lynn

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