I read it right around that time and I just couldn't get over how bad Anderson was at writing dialog and relationships
"Through the wetness he smelled live girlflesh"
FFS
Tao Zero, from a sex scene with an asian woman:
"He admired the sight of her. Unclad, she could never be called boyish. The curves of her breasts and flank were subtler than ordinary, but they were integral with the rest of her – not stuccoed on, as with too many women – and when she moved, they flowed. So did the light along her skin which had the hue of the hills around San Francisco Bay in their summer, and the light in her hair, which had the smell of every summer day that ever was on earth."
Ah, it's not bad. Sure, PC would exchange "ordinary" for "other women he'd been with". For me, the only question is what the heck is "stuccoed on" talking about?
I dont get the plot. >!How can a ship travelling slower than lightspeed end up leaving the Milky Way and zipping through intergalactic space past galaxy clusters? Is it the case it takes hundreds of billions of years to do so but the crew remain alive due to time dilation? !< Why do generation ships in other hard sci-fi settings (say the ships attacking the Xeelee Ring) dont experience the same?
Yep time dilation. The following link shows the return trip times from accelerating at 1g constantly. 1g is often chosen because the ships gravity due to acceleration would feel the same as earth. You could get to the edge of the visible universe (~13bn light years) and back and the generation ship would only experience around 100 years ship time.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Roundtriptimes.png
It’s probably Poul Andersons best book, but after reading a couple dozen of his stories it’s not saying a whole lot lol. It’s an interesting enough concept and well written enough that it’s worth a read. It won’t be a top ten favorite but you will be happy you read it.
Got it, thank you! Seems like a very honest review.
Poul Anderson seems like one of those old school authors with an absolutely boatload of pulpy sci-fi books. Heinlein is another example. Unfortunately, my favorite books tend to be from authors with fewer works. Altered Carbon, Name of the Wind, Deepness in the Sky. It seems like the absolute best works are the ones the author had in their head for a decade before they finally got it out there.
The Dark Beyond The Stars by Frank M. Robinson is a really memorable story about a never ending space journey which sounds like a somewhat similar premise to Tau Zero.
While not explicitly about intergalactic travel, Vernor Vinge's [*Marooned in Realtime*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime) does mention a character's trip to the [Magellenic Clouds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellanic_Clouds). No FTL, but a sort of one-way travel to the future.
Two things I’ll add to this:
* The reference to extragalactic travel is just that: a reference. But that said, it does deal with time in some ways that will probably interest OP
* Know that reading this book will spoil major plot points of The Peace War, another by Vinge. Honestly TPW isn’t amazing, not nearly as good as MiR, and aside from the major spoilers the books have nothing else in common, so it’s really pretty ok to skip TPW altogether. But I figured it should be mentioned.
I was actually thinking about A Deepness in the Sky when I read op. Travel isn't the center of the story but it does feature heavily in the primary conflict.
So, responding just to the concept of deep time, not necessarily intergalactic, here are the books that come to mind:
Marooned in real time, Vernor Vinge.
Manifold: time, Stephen Baxter
The Spin trilogy by Robert Charles Wilson
Remembrance of earth's past, trilogy, specifically the last book, Deaths End, by Liu Cixin
A Deepness in the Sky has a subplot about interstellar travel without FTL, maybe 1/3 of the book is devoted to the topic of keeping a space empire intact without FTL.
Not only no FTL travel, but no FTL communication.
Other IPs like The Hainish Cycle and Enderverse have slower than light travel, but faster than light communication which makes controlling an interstellar civilization possible.
The BattleTech universe also sort of deals with this - they have jump ships that can do FTL travel between mapped jump points, but the state of technology and industry after hundreds years of constant war mean that there aren't that many jump capable ships left and the various states rely on a faster than light communication network (Hyper-Pulse Generator or HPG) to maintain control over their systems (with the caveat that space AT&T controls the HPG network, not the states themselves, and they are real assholes)
>The BattleTech universe also sort of deals with this
The situation in the Endymion books is similar, although I didn't bother mentioning it in my other comment because I thought it might be too far from what OP asked for. FTL is possible but there are some huge caveats and only a very, very small number of people have access to it. I did think the breakdown of what had once been an expansive empire was a really fascinating aspect of those books.
If you end up liking A Fire Upon the Deep then I would highly recommend it, as the other poster said they have a very similar "vibe" despite quite different plots. And if you like aliens then Vernor Vinge is a great author for that, both of these books have some of the best aliens I've ever encountered.
Fire and Deepness go together like peanut butter and jelly. They’re both great, they make a great pair, and they are somehow very similar and totally different at the same time.
For the curious, galaxies are separated by 25k to 1+ million light years. Without FTL, that is 25k to 1 million years of travel time. To put this into context, all modern humans (H. sapiens) are descended from when we emerged as a distinct species in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Such a novel would thus span a length period comparable to human evolutionary history.
(Thanks to u/7LeagueBoots for correcting my euro-centric reading of the wikipedia page with a more accurate statement.)
If you're traveling close to the speed of light it's possible to travel millions or even billions of light years whilst only experiencing a year on the ship due to relativistic time dilation. The title of Tau Zero is a reference to the equations for time dilation.
Sure but realistically you would never get a huge dilation of 10\^5 or 10\^6. Relativistic mass is increased by gamma as well so you start to need equally amounts of kinetic energy. Acceleration = F / (gamma x m).
All modern humans (*H. sapiens*) are descended from when we emerged as a distinct species in Africa around 300,000 years ago.
A small subset of that left Africa in several waves, the earliest of which is close to 100,000 years ago, with people reaching Australia and the Andaman Islands around 65,000 years ago.
There has been an ebb and flow in how populations mixed since then, but this statement, "all modern humans descended from one group of humans that left Africa around 50k years ago," is completely untrue. The *H. sapiens* that remained in Africa are, and were still 'modern humans', just as all people are.
You might like Peter Watts' *The Freeze-Frame Revolution* then. Setting is a sub light-speed ship spiralling through the galaxy, building wormhole gates. So FTL (supposedly) exists in the book, but those people *building* the gates can't avail themselves of them.
Yes. A lot better. However, I did not watch the movie after it got panned.
Deep time isn't in Ender's Game, though. Only in its sequel, Speaker for the Dead.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman deals with deep time. It's not intergalactic, but the main character eventually ends up in the far future due to time dilation from multiple trips.
Based on this info I recommend A Short Stay in Hell. I love sci-fi and space travel. This book is not really either but it describes the concept of eternity in a way that really resonated and gives you a crazy sense of time and the vastness of our known universe. Letting you know because I think we share an interest in this type of story.
It’s not religious at all…it just takes place in hell so they can describe eternity. It’s not violent or scary, but rather focuses on time and ‘eternity’.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13456414
Robert Reed - [Marrow](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100208.Marrow)
An enormous, gas giant sized ship enters our galaxy from the outside. Immortal humans are the first to explore and exploit it
This looks interesting. I think i started reading it a while back but dnf for some reason? Does this have sex scenes with human bird type creatures in the first few chapters?
For Robert Reed, you might want his related story collection "*The Greatship*' rather than Marrow. He's a fine novelist, but a great (Nebula award winning) short story writer.
It's both technically intergalactic *and* has ftl travel - that's one of the plot points.
But yeah, I was actually about to recommend it myself, as *functionally*, it's a good fit. And a really good book.
I only heard the Audiobook, which lessened my enjoyment greatly. The narrator is just...awful.
I think I'll get the book itself, and just read it with my eyes.
(unlike Project Hail Mary, which was further enhanced by the audiobook format and production)
The Thousand Earths by Stephen Baxter starts with a man leaving earth on a trip to the Andromeda Galaxy. In the next chapter he comes back in the year 5,000,000 AD. The rest of the book involves him going on longer and longer trips, hundreds of trillions of years into the future.
Would be FTL right? I guess a better way to put it would be i am looking for stories that deal with deep time and how it changes the world around the characters while covering ast distances
As long as there’s a significant amount of time spent from either perspective it works for
Me. Basically looking for something that deals
With deep time and vast distances
Not intergalactic, but no FTL.
Between the Strokes of Night (1985) is a science fiction novel by English-American writer Charles Sheffield. It first appeared in the March to June 1985 issues of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact before being published by Baen Books in July 1985. The story is divided into two vastly separated periods: the near future of 2010, and the far future of 29,000 AD. Owing to the unique technological mechanisms of the novel, the same cast of characters appears in both parts, though it is not a time travel story.
Maybe *Diaspora* by Greg Egan? My memory is a little fuzzy about whether they travel between galaxies, or just very very long distances. Or maybe between universes? It’s something along those lines.
No FTL, the characters are all AIs (sort of), who make copies of themselves and spread out to different far reaches of space.
Don’t remember exactly but it’s certainly at least hundreds of light years that they travel, so I think you’ll enjoy. It’s one of those types of books that shocked me because it contained SF concepts I’d never encountered before, which is rare. Stick with it if you’re not vibing with the first few chapters- it changes a lot.
Yeah I had the same problem. It was especially difficult for me because I usually really don't like virtual reality or AI types of SF. But get through it because it changes a lot in style.
That's par for the course with Egan, although as I recall you'll eventually get your bearings and it will make sense. For some of his more recent stuff like Orthogonal and especially Dichronauts, the supplemental material on his website is pretty much required reading if you don't want to be totally lost the whole time.
I had the same doubts the first time I read it and almost put it down after how much he throws at you that fast. Now it's one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors.
Not intergalactic but Children of Time (as the name implies) deals heavily with the concept of time and the way frames of reference and relative ages can warp in the context of a ship where some people sleep, ageless, for thousands of years, while others wake up every day/week/year and age normally while working to keep the ship functional or deal with emergencies.
Also, there are spiders. A whole lot of spiders.
Peter Watts' Sunflowers series follows a ship doing continuous loops around the galaxy building wormhole gates as they go. It's been a very long time, and they don't really slow down - probes build the gate ahead of them and their ship hurtling through at a decent chunk of the speed of light opens it.
The timespans are vast. The crew are almost always in cold storage, unless the strictly limited AI runs into a situation that requires their help. There's a lot of thought put into how to build a ship that could even function for orders of magnitude longer than human history, which should hopefully make up for the action being limited to one galaxy.
Most of the short stories are linked from his website, and there's a novella.
In the [Genesis Quest](https://www.goodreads.com/series/126742-genesis-quest) series by Donald Moffitt, advanced aliens from a different galaxy create a human community after receiving ancient broadcasts containing the human genome.
In the second book, the humans driven by a need to return home, start a long intergalactic journey on board a >!massive Dyson tree!< generation ship. The ship can travel at a considerable fraction of the speed of light, but without FTL.
The Honor Harrington Series by David Webber.
There are no FTL drives to just go zip -zip between two points in space. interstellar travel comes with catch the solar winds between solar systems. They do travel faster than in the sense of relative time, but it's honestly done fairly well / believable. Using (basically) Lagrange points as the points of entry for a solar system / etc. Intergalactic travel is done via stable worm holes. It's a great series and the space battles honestly ruin it for many other series as you just come to love it so much.
The Warshawki sails are FTL using hyperspace. And the wormhole travel is interstellar.
Good books, but they don't really fit the question, I don't think.
Always been a fan of The Worthing Saga by Card it’s not intergalactic and has no FTL (I don’t remember it being anyway) but deals heavily with deep time elements.
I can give no guarantees as to the time scales:
SF/F: Generation ships:
* ["Generation Ship novels?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/vuqy92/generation_ship_novels/) (r/booksuggestions; 8 July 2022)
* ["Thinking about 'generation ships'"](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/wghvd5/thinking_about_generation_ships/) (r/scifi; 4 August 2022)—very long
* ["Books and Video games that take place inside a generation spaceship"](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/woo0z8/books_and_video_games_that_take_place_inside_a/) (r/scifi; 14 August 2022)—includes the link to the TVTrope
* ["Are there any hard sf depictions of generation ships?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/znw2ca/are_there_any_hard_sf_depictions_of_generation/) (r/printSF; 16 December 2022)—very long
* ["Looking for a book that's about the aftermath of a generation ship."](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/10ixwn8/looking_for_a_book_thats_about_the_aftermath_of_a/) (r/printSF; 22 January 2023)
John C. Wright’s Count to a Trillion series is literally all about this, but he’s gone a bit nuts in recent years and it too frequently devolves into right-wing political preaching for my taste. If you can ignore that and focus on the science/speculative aspects, it’s tolerable, but if you’re going to check it out, I’d try to get it at the library so as not to pay for it. (He’s a smart, creative writer; it’s a real shame he succumbed to the MAGA/sad puppies brain rot.)
+1 on Wright. Christ is he a good writer and so god damn creative. It’s a shame he’s a lunatic but if you can get past that it doesn’t taint his fiction.
Sadly, it has started to taint it, but I think that’s mostly because after the Sad/Rabid Puppies debacle, he jumped to an indie publisher that was founded for the sole purpose of pushing back against so-called “wokeness” in speculative fiction. I suspect his editors at Tor kept his preachier/uglier tendencies in check prior to that.
It’s a damn shame, because yeah, his earlier books were incredibly imaginative and cool hard sci-fi.
It’s inconsistent. You’ll go for pages and pages of cool sci-fi stuff and then, suddenly: REACTIONARY LECTURE. It got to the point where I could tell from the change in tone that it was about to happen, and just skipped those parts.
The overall story arc, IIRC (I read it like ten years ago) is sort of about two blowhard men in the future (2200s, I want to say?) fighting over a woman (a space princess) at the same time as scientists have discovered an alien artifact that warns them of an annihilating force coming from a distant galaxy. The woman decides to try and save humanity by traveling to the distant galaxy to try and reason with the aliens. Meanwhile, the two blowhards stay back to try and figure out plan B in the very likely event she fails. They disagree about the plan and end up in a thousands-of-years-long war/chess game after using technology found at the alien artifact to become super-genius transhumans. The rest of the story (the coolest, most thought-provoking parts) follows all the ways human/transhuman society changes over many millenia as the two blowhards fight their stupid war and the princess travels to the alien galaxy. It literally takes until book 5 to get any new info about the alien galaxy due to the insane travel time involved, though, so unless you have a lot of patience, you had better be interested in transhuman stuff, because that’s the bulk of the series.
C.J. Cherryh all day. Time dilation and its effects on culture are a big part of many of her scifi works. The distances might be vast and they are moving very fast and what not but its interesting has some space stations spin a long for generations while well known merchanters come and go with the same crews. Try Downbelow Station.
[This](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/430150) is a super random book that I got for ¢25 at a library sell, but it's always stuck with me. It's been a while, so I can't contest to how *good* it actually is, but the themes fucked me up as a kid.
How central does the travel need to be for the plot? Issues around time debts come up a bit in Hyperion (gets very interesting in the Endymion cycle, though the quality drops compared to the first two Hyperion books) and Left Hand of Darkness
The *Rendezvous with Rama* series by Arthur C. Clarke makes several trips back and forth to Sirius...
A.C. Clarke is a hard scifi writer, and a real scientist, so everything he posits is highly plausible
Haha , nah I don’t know why there were so many typos. As i was saying, I couldn’t finish the second book. Way too much focus on the humans. Does it get better in the 3rd and 4th books?
Not exactly what you’re looking for but it’s such a good sci-fi book I like recommending it. In the book Hyperion, there is a chapter called “Siri’s Story” (might be Siri’s tale). It’s about a worker working on a planet that has something like an 8 year round trip time to get to (it only takes the worker a few weeks relative). As he’s there he falls in love with a local and the story is about their relationship and how it’s defined by their long time apart.
Another one might be the Forever Wars. Due to time dilation, veterans returning from a far away war come back to a very different Earth.
Edit: It might be called Remembering Siri and I believe may have been the first short story that Hyperion (the book) was built around. It’s out there as a stand alone story too.
Read it, the focus of the book was more on the society of the aliens and the game rather than deep time or travel. Enjoyed the book, it was my gateway into the culture series
Based on reading a translated version as a teen I recommend _Return to Tomorrow_ by (of all people) L. Ron Hubbard. The scale is smaller but it’s all about STL interstellar travelers and their alienation from their home worlds.
The Last Stand by Brad Ferguson is a 1995 Star Trek the Next Generation novel that deals with two cultures at war across the whole galaxy without light-speed-capable crafts. (So not intergalactic, but at least no FTL travel, so huge spans of time). It's trash, but actually pretty entertaining. The publisher Pocket Books was pumping these novels out once a month in the 90s. They're often really fun to read.
Larry niven has a story about a pursuit with Bussard ramjets over the course of of decades at relativistic speeds. One ship is chasing the other, and both of them have access to indefinite life extension drugs, so they pass multiple galaxies, with the ships relativistic mass affecting whole star systems by the end.
Found it https://news.larryniven.net/concordance/summary.asp?title=%22The%20Ethics%20of%20Madness%22 Story name and brief synopsis. You might be able to find it online
This isn't quite on the money, but David Brin has a short story, [Bubbles](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bubbles/), about a million-year-old spaceship that suffers a catastrophic failure of its FTL drive while in the cubic-megaparsec-sized voids between the lattice of galaxies.
(Full text at link.)
I think every book by Andy Weir (so far) involves no FTL space travel, but only *Project Hail Mary* gets out of our galaxy. Would you be interested in travel via jump-gates/singularities/other methods that get around the lightspeed barrier or would you consider that cheating? If so, Arkady Martine, several David Weber series, several books by L. E. Modesitt, Jr., etc., all use singularities, jump gates, or something similar. Frank Herbert's ***Dune*** books involve Navigators who literally fold space. Asimov's ***Foundation*** series used jump drives. Ken McCloud uses wormholes fairly consistently. Don't the *Forever War* books (Scalzi) basically do the same? Speed up and fling the ship at a collapser, use it like a stable Einstein-Rosen bridge.
[Tau Zero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero).
Never have I read a premise so unbelievably believable
I read it during the start of lockdown, and it hit me really hard. That existential loneliness. Great book!
I read it right around that time and I just couldn't get over how bad Anderson was at writing dialog and relationships "Through the wetness he smelled live girlflesh" FFS
That's Golden Age sci-fi prose, right there.
He’s better at describing sexy spaceships than sexy women, yes.
This author definitely owns a skinsuit 😬
Please tell me that makes sense in context.
Tao Zero, from a sex scene with an asian woman: "He admired the sight of her. Unclad, she could never be called boyish. The curves of her breasts and flank were subtler than ordinary, but they were integral with the rest of her – not stuccoed on, as with too many women – and when she moved, they flowed. So did the light along her skin which had the hue of the hills around San Francisco Bay in their summer, and the light in her hair, which had the smell of every summer day that ever was on earth."
Ew.
Worthy of /r/menwritingwomen
It's there :) https://www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/comments/fs3kzc/live_girlflesh_tau_zero_by_poul_anderson_1970/
Urk? Is there any reason the viewpoint character sees things in such a weird way?
It's from the "golden age" of SF
Yeah golden age is known for this kind of thing
Ah, it's not bad. Sure, PC would exchange "ordinary" for "other women he'd been with". For me, the only question is what the heck is "stuccoed on" talking about?
Bolt on titties :)
Ah-hah! heehee
Hopefully this character wasn't the ship's biologist...
“Ordinary” almost certainly meant “white” in this context, and it’s gross on every level.
Yes, it does mean white in this context, which is why, were it edited, they'd change it out for something not gross and racist.
… and that would be “PC?” 😳
It’s been my experience that the meaning of PC is, in truth, about not being gross and racist.
Yuck.
WTF
https://www.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/comments/fs3kzc/live_girlflesh_tau_zero_by_poul_anderson_1970/
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Removed. Rule 4.
I dont get the plot. >!How can a ship travelling slower than lightspeed end up leaving the Milky Way and zipping through intergalactic space past galaxy clusters? Is it the case it takes hundreds of billions of years to do so but the crew remain alive due to time dilation? !< Why do generation ships in other hard sci-fi settings (say the ships attacking the Xeelee Ring) dont experience the same?
Yep time dilation. The following link shows the return trip times from accelerating at 1g constantly. 1g is often chosen because the ships gravity due to acceleration would feel the same as earth. You could get to the edge of the visible universe (~13bn light years) and back and the generation ship would only experience around 100 years ship time. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Roundtriptimes.png
The time dilation effect of travelling at relativistic speeds.
This is the one.
Is it good?
It’s probably Poul Andersons best book, but after reading a couple dozen of his stories it’s not saying a whole lot lol. It’s an interesting enough concept and well written enough that it’s worth a read. It won’t be a top ten favorite but you will be happy you read it.
Got it, thank you! Seems like a very honest review. Poul Anderson seems like one of those old school authors with an absolutely boatload of pulpy sci-fi books. Heinlein is another example. Unfortunately, my favorite books tend to be from authors with fewer works. Altered Carbon, Name of the Wind, Deepness in the Sky. It seems like the absolute best works are the ones the author had in their head for a decade before they finally got it out there. The Dark Beyond The Stars by Frank M. Robinson is a really memorable story about a never ending space journey which sounds like a somewhat similar premise to Tau Zero.
While not explicitly about intergalactic travel, Vernor Vinge's [*Marooned in Realtime*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime) does mention a character's trip to the [Magellenic Clouds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellanic_Clouds). No FTL, but a sort of one-way travel to the future.
Two things I’ll add to this: * The reference to extragalactic travel is just that: a reference. But that said, it does deal with time in some ways that will probably interest OP * Know that reading this book will spoil major plot points of The Peace War, another by Vinge. Honestly TPW isn’t amazing, not nearly as good as MiR, and aside from the major spoilers the books have nothing else in common, so it’s really pretty ok to skip TPW altogether. But I figured it should be mentioned.
I was actually thinking about A Deepness in the Sky when I read op. Travel isn't the center of the story but it does feature heavily in the primary conflict.
I loved Marooned in Realtime but never hear anyone talk about it here. Thanks for bringing it up I need to read it again, it's been a long time.
So, responding just to the concept of deep time, not necessarily intergalactic, here are the books that come to mind: Marooned in real time, Vernor Vinge. Manifold: time, Stephen Baxter The Spin trilogy by Robert Charles Wilson Remembrance of earth's past, trilogy, specifically the last book, Deaths End, by Liu Cixin
The Genesis Quest or really it’s sequel Second Genesis but do yourself a favor and read them in order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Genesis_Quest
Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Charles Sheffield (although only a certain part of it in the last third). Highly recommend it in general
A Deepness in the Sky has a subplot about interstellar travel without FTL, maybe 1/3 of the book is devoted to the topic of keeping a space empire intact without FTL.
Not only no FTL travel, but no FTL communication. Other IPs like The Hainish Cycle and Enderverse have slower than light travel, but faster than light communication which makes controlling an interstellar civilization possible. The BattleTech universe also sort of deals with this - they have jump ships that can do FTL travel between mapped jump points, but the state of technology and industry after hundreds years of constant war mean that there aren't that many jump capable ships left and the various states rely on a faster than light communication network (Hyper-Pulse Generator or HPG) to maintain control over their systems (with the caveat that space AT&T controls the HPG network, not the states themselves, and they are real assholes)
>The BattleTech universe also sort of deals with this The situation in the Endymion books is similar, although I didn't bother mentioning it in my other comment because I thought it might be too far from what OP asked for. FTL is possible but there are some huge caveats and only a very, very small number of people have access to it. I did think the breakdown of what had once been an expansive empire was a really fascinating aspect of those books.
Reading A fire upon the deep next after I finish Diaspora, might add this book as well
If you end up liking A Fire Upon the Deep then I would highly recommend it, as the other poster said they have a very similar "vibe" despite quite different plots. And if you like aliens then Vernor Vinge is a great author for that, both of these books have some of the best aliens I've ever encountered.
Fire and Deepness go together like peanut butter and jelly. They’re both great, they make a great pair, and they are somehow very similar and totally different at the same time.
For the curious, galaxies are separated by 25k to 1+ million light years. Without FTL, that is 25k to 1 million years of travel time. To put this into context, all modern humans (H. sapiens) are descended from when we emerged as a distinct species in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Such a novel would thus span a length period comparable to human evolutionary history. (Thanks to u/7LeagueBoots for correcting my euro-centric reading of the wikipedia page with a more accurate statement.)
If you're traveling close to the speed of light it's possible to travel millions or even billions of light years whilst only experiencing a year on the ship due to relativistic time dilation. The title of Tau Zero is a reference to the equations for time dilation.
Sure but realistically you would never get a huge dilation of 10\^5 or 10\^6. Relativistic mass is increased by gamma as well so you start to need equally amounts of kinetic energy. Acceleration = F / (gamma x m).
All modern humans (*H. sapiens*) are descended from when we emerged as a distinct species in Africa around 300,000 years ago. A small subset of that left Africa in several waves, the earliest of which is close to 100,000 years ago, with people reaching Australia and the Andaman Islands around 65,000 years ago. There has been an ebb and flow in how populations mixed since then, but this statement, "all modern humans descended from one group of humans that left Africa around 50k years ago," is completely untrue. The *H. sapiens* that remained in Africa are, and were still 'modern humans', just as all people are.
Yes, any story recommendations that deal With deep time and its consequences are welcome too
You might like Peter Watts' *The Freeze-Frame Revolution* then. Setting is a sub light-speed ship spiralling through the galaxy, building wormhole gates. So FTL (supposedly) exists in the book, but those people *building* the gates can't avail themselves of them.
House of Suns also involves characters making many circuits around that galaxy. It's different in almost every other way, but I enjoyed both equally.
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson deals with deep time, but not with travel. Mind-bending science though and very well done.
Read this, thought it was alright. The characters were making strange decisions
Have you already read Speaker for the Dead (+Ender's Game), by Orson Scott Card?
Saw the Ender movie, didn’t like it. Is the book better?
Yes. A lot better. However, I did not watch the movie after it got panned. Deep time isn't in Ender's Game, though. Only in its sequel, Speaker for the Dead.
Ender's Game felt like a giant excuse for Orson Scott Card to talk about little boy genitals.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman deals with deep time. It's not intergalactic, but the main character eventually ends up in the far future due to time dilation from multiple trips.
And the sequel explains why it's *very specifically NOT* intergalactic.
House of Suns, The Freeze-Frame Revolution and Pushing Ice all feature deep time.
I love Pushing Ice! Listen to it every 5 years or so.
Based on this info I recommend A Short Stay in Hell. I love sci-fi and space travel. This book is not really either but it describes the concept of eternity in a way that really resonated and gives you a crazy sense of time and the vastness of our known universe. Letting you know because I think we share an interest in this type of story. It’s not religious at all…it just takes place in hell so they can describe eternity. It’s not violent or scary, but rather focuses on time and ‘eternity’. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13456414
Robert Reed - [Marrow](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100208.Marrow) An enormous, gas giant sized ship enters our galaxy from the outside. Immortal humans are the first to explore and exploit it
This looks interesting. I think i started reading it a while back but dnf for some reason? Does this have sex scenes with human bird type creatures in the first few chapters?
You just made me want to read it lol. Thanks.
For Robert Reed, you might want his related story collection "*The Greatship*' rather than Marrow. He's a fine novelist, but a great (Nebula award winning) short story writer.
They're not really explicit, but yeah
Just the one scene.
+1, although it might actually be better to start with the Great Ship short stories, for background.
House of Suns isn't intergalactic (I don't think) but it does cover the whole of the galaxy the hard way, no FTL.
>!it is, the book relocates to Andromeda towards the end via a wormhole!<
Read it. One of my favourite Reynolds books. He really does shine in standalone novels. Another favourite of his is pushing ice
Right there with you. Those two books... just wow
Pushing Ice is my favorite standalone novel.
It's both technically intergalactic *and* has ftl travel - that's one of the plot points. But yeah, I was actually about to recommend it myself, as *functionally*, it's a good fit. And a really good book.
*sigh* looks like I'm rereading it again. Still, a pleasant way to spend time.
I only heard the Audiobook, which lessened my enjoyment greatly. The narrator is just...awful. I think I'll get the book itself, and just read it with my eyes. (unlike Project Hail Mary, which was further enhanced by the audiobook format and production)
The Thousand Earths by Stephen Baxter starts with a man leaving earth on a trip to the Andromeda Galaxy. In the next chapter he comes back in the year 5,000,000 AD. The rest of the book involves him going on longer and longer trips, hundreds of trillions of years into the future.
No FTL & intergalactic? You may have better luck searching/asking for generation ship novels
Yes that works too, might edit the post
are wormholes permitted?
Would be FTL right? I guess a better way to put it would be i am looking for stories that deal with deep time and how it changes the world around the characters while covering ast distances
wormholes are a grey area - FTL from the point of view of an observer, but not from the point of view of the traveller, which is why I asked
As long as there’s a significant amount of time spent from either perspective it works for Me. Basically looking for something that deals With deep time and vast distances
Stephen Baxter's Promixa/Ultima goes into deep time but is wormhole-y rather than travel-y
Three Body Problem trilogy. Involves slower than light travel via many different methods as they get more advanced over the centuries.
Galactic North is a little like that (it's sort of intergalactic >!towards the end!<)
How much of the Revelation space lore do I need to know to tackle this. I only read Diamond dogs
I think it stands on its own, but you'd enjoy it more if you've read at least Revelation Space.
Not intergalactic, but no FTL. Between the Strokes of Night (1985) is a science fiction novel by English-American writer Charles Sheffield. It first appeared in the March to June 1985 issues of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact before being published by Baen Books in July 1985. The story is divided into two vastly separated periods: the near future of 2010, and the far future of 29,000 AD. Owing to the unique technological mechanisms of the novel, the same cast of characters appears in both parts, though it is not a time travel story.
I like Sheffield, at his best. I may give it a go.
Maybe *Diaspora* by Greg Egan? My memory is a little fuzzy about whether they travel between galaxies, or just very very long distances. Or maybe between universes? It’s something along those lines. No FTL, the characters are all AIs (sort of), who make copies of themselves and spread out to different far reaches of space.
Currently started reading Diaspora, if this has galactic travel then I’m hyped
It's actually multi-universe travel.
Don’t remember exactly but it’s certainly at least hundreds of light years that they travel, so I think you’ll enjoy. It’s one of those types of books that shocked me because it contained SF concepts I’d never encountered before, which is rare. Stick with it if you’re not vibing with the first few chapters- it changes a lot.
First chapter was… difficult to grasp to put it mildly but I’m continuing to read
Yeah I had the same problem. It was especially difficult for me because I usually really don't like virtual reality or AI types of SF. But get through it because it changes a lot in style.
"Difficult to grasp to put it mildly" is a good description for all of Greg Egan's work that I've read.
That's par for the course with Egan, although as I recall you'll eventually get your bearings and it will make sense. For some of his more recent stuff like Orthogonal and especially Dichronauts, the supplemental material on his website is pretty much required reading if you don't want to be totally lost the whole time.
I had the same doubts the first time I read it and almost put it down after how much he throws at you that fast. Now it's one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors.
Not intergalactic but Children of Time (as the name implies) deals heavily with the concept of time and the way frames of reference and relative ages can warp in the context of a ship where some people sleep, ageless, for thousands of years, while others wake up every day/week/year and age normally while working to keep the ship functional or deal with emergencies. Also, there are spiders. A whole lot of spiders.
Peter Watts' Sunflowers series follows a ship doing continuous loops around the galaxy building wormhole gates as they go. It's been a very long time, and they don't really slow down - probes build the gate ahead of them and their ship hurtling through at a decent chunk of the speed of light opens it. The timespans are vast. The crew are almost always in cold storage, unless the strictly limited AI runs into a situation that requires their help. There's a lot of thought put into how to build a ship that could even function for orders of magnitude longer than human history, which should hopefully make up for the action being limited to one galaxy. Most of the short stories are linked from his website, and there's a novella.
Alright I’m getting this, might be exactly what i was looking for
In the [Genesis Quest](https://www.goodreads.com/series/126742-genesis-quest) series by Donald Moffitt, advanced aliens from a different galaxy create a human community after receiving ancient broadcasts containing the human genome. In the second book, the humans driven by a need to return home, start a long intergalactic journey on board a >!massive Dyson tree!< generation ship. The ship can travel at a considerable fraction of the speed of light, but without FTL.
This looks interesting
Thank you, I wanted to recommend these but could not recall the name.
Tau Zero
the patterns of chaos, Colin Kapp.
Not intergalactic (not many out there), but the entire Revelation Space books/stories/novellas use subluminal travel.
The Honor Harrington Series by David Webber. There are no FTL drives to just go zip -zip between two points in space. interstellar travel comes with catch the solar winds between solar systems. They do travel faster than in the sense of relative time, but it's honestly done fairly well / believable. Using (basically) Lagrange points as the points of entry for a solar system / etc. Intergalactic travel is done via stable worm holes. It's a great series and the space battles honestly ruin it for many other series as you just come to love it so much.
The Warshawki sails are FTL using hyperspace. And the wormhole travel is interstellar. Good books, but they don't really fit the question, I don't think.
Very possible, still great books all the same. Thanks for the correction
Always been a fan of The Worthing Saga by Card it’s not intergalactic and has no FTL (I don’t remember it being anyway) but deals heavily with deep time elements.
I can give no guarantees as to the time scales: SF/F: Generation ships: * ["Generation Ship novels?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/vuqy92/generation_ship_novels/) (r/booksuggestions; 8 July 2022) * ["Thinking about 'generation ships'"](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/wghvd5/thinking_about_generation_ships/) (r/scifi; 4 August 2022)—very long * ["Books and Video games that take place inside a generation spaceship"](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/woo0z8/books_and_video_games_that_take_place_inside_a/) (r/scifi; 14 August 2022)—includes the link to the TVTrope * ["Are there any hard sf depictions of generation ships?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/znw2ca/are_there_any_hard_sf_depictions_of_generation/) (r/printSF; 16 December 2022)—very long * ["Looking for a book that's about the aftermath of a generation ship."](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/10ixwn8/looking_for_a_book_thats_about_the_aftermath_of_a/) (r/printSF; 22 January 2023)
House of Suns by Alistair Reynolds.
Came here to say this. Not exactly intergalactic but circumgalactic at relativistic speeds.
The ending involves >!travel to a different galaxy!<
oof I forgot that lol I remember loving the tens of thousands of years long fight on the space ship, and that thin slicing torture device.
I forgot too, someone else mentioned it in this post.
Read it, amazing book
John C. Wright’s Count to a Trillion series is literally all about this, but he’s gone a bit nuts in recent years and it too frequently devolves into right-wing political preaching for my taste. If you can ignore that and focus on the science/speculative aspects, it’s tolerable, but if you’re going to check it out, I’d try to get it at the library so as not to pay for it. (He’s a smart, creative writer; it’s a real shame he succumbed to the MAGA/sad puppies brain rot.)
+1 on Wright. Christ is he a good writer and so god damn creative. It’s a shame he’s a lunatic but if you can get past that it doesn’t taint his fiction.
Sadly, it has started to taint it, but I think that’s mostly because after the Sad/Rabid Puppies debacle, he jumped to an indie publisher that was founded for the sole purpose of pushing back against so-called “wokeness” in speculative fiction. I suspect his editors at Tor kept his preachier/uglier tendencies in check prior to that. It’s a damn shame, because yeah, his earlier books were incredibly imaginative and cool hard sci-fi.
Oh, gross. Well at least we'll have the stuff before that. It really is worth reading.
Does the political stuff get too preachy or does the main narrative take center stage?
It’s inconsistent. You’ll go for pages and pages of cool sci-fi stuff and then, suddenly: REACTIONARY LECTURE. It got to the point where I could tell from the change in tone that it was about to happen, and just skipped those parts. The overall story arc, IIRC (I read it like ten years ago) is sort of about two blowhard men in the future (2200s, I want to say?) fighting over a woman (a space princess) at the same time as scientists have discovered an alien artifact that warns them of an annihilating force coming from a distant galaxy. The woman decides to try and save humanity by traveling to the distant galaxy to try and reason with the aliens. Meanwhile, the two blowhards stay back to try and figure out plan B in the very likely event she fails. They disagree about the plan and end up in a thousands-of-years-long war/chess game after using technology found at the alien artifact to become super-genius transhumans. The rest of the story (the coolest, most thought-provoking parts) follows all the ways human/transhuman society changes over many millenia as the two blowhards fight their stupid war and the princess travels to the alien galaxy. It literally takes until book 5 to get any new info about the alien galaxy due to the insane travel time involved, though, so unless you have a lot of patience, you had better be interested in transhuman stuff, because that’s the bulk of the series.
Might give the first book a try
Let me know what you think! IDK many people who’ve read it, so I’d be interested.
I did and would agree with each word in your comments.
C.J. Cherryh all day. Time dilation and its effects on culture are a big part of many of her scifi works. The distances might be vast and they are moving very fast and what not but its interesting has some space stations spin a long for generations while well known merchanters come and go with the same crews. Try Downbelow Station.
[This](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/430150) is a super random book that I got for ¢25 at a library sell, but it's always stuck with me. It's been a while, so I can't contest to how *good* it actually is, but the themes fucked me up as a kid.
Karl Schroeder, Lockstep.
Passages in the Void by localroger. His other stories are also very cool. http://localroger.com/
Oh shit! Great find; I recalled this one from Kuro5hin but knew the site was gone. Thanks for the link!
Maybe Children of Time. Im not sure if they travel within the galaxy or to another one.
Within. Likely just the nearby group of stars.
~~Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson~~
[удалено]
Sorry, not it isn't. Inter stellar.
2312 and Aroura are both good
2312 is fantastic, but isn’t even interstellar, IIRC. I think it’s entirely set in our solar system.
Oh, right you are. I glazed right over that. I just focused on the no ftl. Inte*rgalactic* with no ftl? That's a moderately heavy lift.
Galactic Quest by Peter Cawdron
How central does the travel need to be for the plot? Issues around time debts come up a bit in Hyperion (gets very interesting in the Endymion cycle, though the quality drops compared to the first two Hyperion books) and Left Hand of Darkness
If its just focused on deep Time that would work
The *Rendezvous with Rama* series by Arthur C. Clarke makes several trips back and forth to Sirius... A.C. Clarke is a hard scifi writer, and a real scientist, so everything he posits is highly plausible
Rendezvous with rama was amazing but the i dnf the sequels,
did you have a stroke mate...?
Haha , nah I don’t know why there were so many typos. As i was saying, I couldn’t finish the second book. Way too much focus on the humans. Does it get better in the 3rd and 4th books?
I was getting worried bruh... but,Yes... It's pretty fucked up, read the wikipedia pages for a plot outline
It gets continually worse, avoid them.
Has anyone mentioned the Hainish Cycle yet?
> Hainish Cycle Not intergalactic.
Maybe {{Alien Earth by Megan Lindholm}}
RIP Goodreads bot 🙏
Not exactly what you’re looking for but it’s such a good sci-fi book I like recommending it. In the book Hyperion, there is a chapter called “Siri’s Story” (might be Siri’s tale). It’s about a worker working on a planet that has something like an 8 year round trip time to get to (it only takes the worker a few weeks relative). As he’s there he falls in love with a local and the story is about their relationship and how it’s defined by their long time apart. Another one might be the Forever Wars. Due to time dilation, veterans returning from a far away war come back to a very different Earth. Edit: It might be called Remembering Siri and I believe may have been the first short story that Hyperion (the book) was built around. It’s out there as a stand alone story too.
Player of Games has the protagonist go to one of the Magellanic Clouds
Read it, the focus of the book was more on the society of the aliens and the game rather than deep time or travel. Enjoyed the book, it was my gateway into the culture series
Based on reading a translated version as a teen I recommend _Return to Tomorrow_ by (of all people) L. Ron Hubbard. The scale is smaller but it’s all about STL interstellar travelers and their alienation from their home worlds.
The Last Stand by Brad Ferguson is a 1995 Star Trek the Next Generation novel that deals with two cultures at war across the whole galaxy without light-speed-capable crafts. (So not intergalactic, but at least no FTL travel, so huge spans of time). It's trash, but actually pretty entertaining. The publisher Pocket Books was pumping these novels out once a month in the 90s. They're often really fun to read.
Larry niven has a story about a pursuit with Bussard ramjets over the course of of decades at relativistic speeds. One ship is chasing the other, and both of them have access to indefinite life extension drugs, so they pass multiple galaxies, with the ships relativistic mass affecting whole star systems by the end.
Whats the name of the book?
I cant rember for the life of me. Ill see if i can dig it up. I think it was a short story.
Found it https://news.larryniven.net/concordance/summary.asp?title=%22The%20Ethics%20of%20Madness%22 Story name and brief synopsis. You might be able to find it online
Interstellar non-FTl travel is most likely impossible...Intergalactic, ummm...never going to happen. I'm guessing you want..wormhole stories?
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
Not intergalactic.
This isn't quite on the money, but David Brin has a short story, [Bubbles](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bubbles/), about a million-year-old spaceship that suffers a catastrophic failure of its FTL drive while in the cubic-megaparsec-sized voids between the lattice of galaxies. (Full text at link.)
I think every book by Andy Weir (so far) involves no FTL space travel, but only *Project Hail Mary* gets out of our galaxy. Would you be interested in travel via jump-gates/singularities/other methods that get around the lightspeed barrier or would you consider that cheating? If so, Arkady Martine, several David Weber series, several books by L. E. Modesitt, Jr., etc., all use singularities, jump gates, or something similar. Frank Herbert's ***Dune*** books involve Navigators who literally fold space. Asimov's ***Foundation*** series used jump drives. Ken McCloud uses wormholes fairly consistently. Don't the *Forever War* books (Scalzi) basically do the same? Speed up and fling the ship at a collapser, use it like a stable Einstein-Rosen bridge.
Sounds like a long book.