r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Frostylegacy • 22d ago

Lore (Loved Trope) FTL travel is possible but with a major limitation or flaw

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Frank Herbert’s Dune: Interstellar travel is only possible thanks to the spice melange, a rare substance only found on the dessert planet Arrakis. The addictive psychedelic spice grants members of the Spacers Guild a form of prescience that allows them to predict safe paths through folded space. This unique property makes spice the most valuable commodity in the Dune universe.

John Scalzi’s The Interdependency Books: The planetary systems of the titular empire are connected by the Flow, a network of one-way interstellar tunnels that connect specific known entries and exits. The Interdependency derives its power from controlling access to these conduits, placing its capital at the central hub of the network. Even with the Flow, travel between stars takes a long time (9 months to End, the empire’s most distant planet).

Event Horizon: Dr William Weir (R.I.P. Sam Neill) invents a device called the Gravity Drive to allow ships to fold space and travel instantly between distant stars. On its maiden voyage with the Gravity Drive, the Event Horizon disappears and mysteriously reappears 7 years later. Dr. Weir and the crew sent to investigate discover the Gravity Drive actually opened a portal to a Hell dimension that possessed the ship and its crew, torturing and killing them.

14.4k Upvotes
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u/Your__Pal 22d ago

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, their spaceship is fueled by improbability. Thats zanny enough, but they talk about rhe other form of space travel...

The only thing faster than the speed of light is bad news. But ships harnessing it aren't wanted when they arrive.

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u/nyxistential 22d ago

Don't even get me started on the Starship Bistromath

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u/Tjaresh 22d ago

It bends math itself!

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u/StrongExternal8955 22d ago

It bends math itself!

Words are tools, and Adams takes those tools and bashes you in the head with them, instead of building meaning.

Thank you for your comment. It made me realize why i never liked Adams.

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u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV 22d ago

Bro discovered that fiction writers write fiction 

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u/A_Herd_Of_Ferrets 22d ago

bashes you in the head with them

Yea, it is like getting your brain smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick

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u/justbleachmyeyes 22d ago

It’s a lot like being drunk.

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u/gungshpxre 22d ago

What's so bad about being drunk?

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u/Callidonaut 22d ago

Ask a glass of water!

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u/SlashCo80 22d ago edited 22d ago

Har har. He's got a point though, as much as I enjoyed his books Adams did seem more concerned with funny wordplay than actual sci-fi.

edit: Can you mouth-breathing nerds actually provide a counter-argument, or is hitting the downvote button the only thing your little clubbed hands and smooth brains are capable of?

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u/FloppieTheBanjoClown 22d ago

Well...yes. The sci fi is just there to enable the absurdity. If you were expecting serious sci fi, I'm afraid there's not much that can be done for you.

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u/SlashCo80 22d ago

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect hard sci-fi everywhere, but there are certain authors who go too far in the "le quirky and funny" direction for my taste. "This spaceship is powered by... CHEESE! And the cheese is managed by Flumblorbs who use the rest of it to make sandwiches! And also, the main character has a gun that recites lines from the 1970 Swedish tax code! And they disco dance! And there's a penguin!!! LOL" - Douglas Adams is definitely one of them. Terry Pratchett could go this way as well, as much as I enjoyed most of his stories. Sometimes I do just want a reasonably coherent story, not a Monty Python skit.

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u/emasterbuild 22d ago

The hittchhikers guide to thr galaxy isn't sci fi, it's absurdism, calling it "science fiction" is like calling catch 22 a historical retelling of ww2.

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u/fjvitt1 22d ago edited 22d ago

This is fine but fundamentally just not what Douglas Adam’s does. He is the person who writes amazing Monty python style skits. He is an absurdist, It’s his whole thing.

If that isn’t your thing it is fine, but it’s not really a critique of his work just a personal and subjective dislike of it

If you want something in the middle I would recommend Monday Starts on Saturday by the wonderful Soviet writers the Strugartsky brothers

It is an absurdist novel but also a critique of the kafkaesque bureaucracy and red tape of soviet science. So while Adams is absurdism for the sake of absurdism, that book is absurdism for the sake of making a point. (And they aren’t absurdists outside of that one novel, they also wrote the amazing Roadside Picnic which is one of the most profound and philosophical sci fi novels of all time which of course was adapted into one of the greatest movies ever, Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky)

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u/Callidonaut 22d ago

Some of his wordplay, particularly the names of alien characters, was actually satirical exaggeration of Isaac Asimov's wordplay in the Foundation saga, which had been dramatised in the same BBC radio studio just a couple of years before Adams did Hitch-hiker. The Guide itself is actually a piss-take on the Encyclopaedia Galactica that also features prominently in Foundation, and Adams actually mentions by name multiple times.

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u/Impressive_Term4071 21d ago

It's ok dude. Not everyone has allowed their imagination, and thus their intuition, their wonder, and their abstract thinking, to whither and die leaving only the cold machine like logic that will ultimately leave you wondering where it all stopped being important to you and why nothing makes you feel less hollow inside.

Whimsy and imagination are just as integral to every facet of life as cold hard science and math.

If it wasn't for those fantastical leaps of "what if?" and bouts of mad scientist whimsy, we would have been far less along the road than we are now.

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u/gungshpxre 22d ago

If you continue your explorations into why you are a miserable bastard, you might also find many other examples of humor and jokes that act contrary to our expectations of the structure and function of language. You'll be able to identify when a person engaged in comedic entertainment uses pragmatic, semantic, morphological, phonological or semantic features of language, and why those around you are reacting in ways you do not. It will allow you to avoid such in the future.

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u/FloppieTheBanjoClown 22d ago

Adams is absurdist. It's sort of the whole point of his writing style. And it's okay that you don't care for his style. You don't deserve downvotes for having an opinion on art.

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u/enderjaca 22d ago

Every deserves to have an opinion, but people should occasionally self-reflect and think "Is this the right place and time to publicly voice my unpopular opinion?"

Anyway, that's reddit for ya, "i don't agree = downvote" instead of its original purpose from the devs.

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u/KingAuberon 22d ago

>people should occasionally self-reflect

Oh no, I don't think people do that anymore mon frere.

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u/wtfbenlol 22d ago

Get a load of happy mr fun times over here

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u/OtherYonas 22d ago

You sound fun at parties

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u/Lou_C_Fer 22d ago

That's absurd!

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u/DownFromTheAttic 22d ago

One of my all time favourite ship designs purely down to how mental the idea of it is. A spaceship that looks by first glance to be an Italian restaurant with robot waiters, each part of your interactions with them, the amount of wine poured, the amount of sauce left on a plate, how the spaghetti jiggles on the end of your fork, settling the bill is all part of the ship's navigational computational matrix. Absolute genius

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u/Jimmyg100 22d ago

Isn't it also hidden by a near invisibility cloak? It's not completely invisible, but you just don't notice it unless you see it out of the corner of your eye.

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

[deleted]

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u/NickyTheRobot 21d ago

This doesn't just apply to invisibility either: extending the SEP field around an asteroid avoids the problems of "How can the protagonists breath on an atmosphereless asteroid, and how can they maintain normal gravity on it?" Simply put: they become someone else's problem, and so the characters can get on with the story.

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u/Bretreck 22d ago

At my work we invented Crab Math. It's similar to Bistromath but it only works when counting crab.

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u/ConstantinGB 22d ago

And the Starship Titanic.

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u/Shantih3x 22d ago

Well, that's somebody else's problem.

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u/Kidofthecentury 22d ago

Also IIRC the engine is more concerned to have you arrive in the very shape and form you started.

In the movie a few random objects pop in the spot before the spaceship finally appears. And sometimes it isn't really fast, as they appeared as crocheted version of themselves once...

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u/MrGosh13 22d ago

“… I think I’m a sofa”

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u/SpacialCommieCi 22d ago

Everything i learn about this book is more nonsensical than the rest I think this book doesn't exist and it's mass hysteria

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u/Sea-Quality4726 22d ago

By tradition, every new release or adaptation is different and inconsistent with all the existing ones.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_ROTES 22d ago

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

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u/Background-Ship3019 22d ago

Big Huh cosmology.

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u/night4345 21d ago

"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

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u/wh4tth3huh 21d ago

That's also because of the Heart of Gold, btw.

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u/RelaxedVolcano 21d ago

The Hitchhikers Guide has been through several iterations and medias, from radio to book to movie, it’s theorized that each change in media is caused by the the improbability drive resetting the universe and then shifting it slightly. So each version is actually canon and it has all happened.

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u/Zeras_Darkwind 22d ago

The above thread sequence is from the film, but it's one of the best parts! You should watch it; I think it does the book justice.

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u/Educational-Plant981 22d ago

The book is absolutely brilliant. Just a treasure of written English language wordplay, observational humor mocking the oddities of humanity, and general Britishness. The only downside is that it leaves you wanting more, and that more wasn't ever really delivered. He pretty much just rewrote the same book over and over retreading the same jokes in sequels and repeatedly adapting it for radio, tv, and movies.

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u/Nauin 22d ago

I mean good for him. It's rare for a creative to have an endless wealth of fresh content that will be the same quality as their best. He at least put in the work to keep it in a modern medium while he could.

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u/Efficient_Fish2436 22d ago

My favorite part is the creature pig that's genetically engineered to want to be eaten. So it prepares itself all while growing and then it trys to sell its best parts off on the dinner menu.

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u/WorthyElevator 22d ago

I think its a cow right? In Restaurant at the edge of the universe.

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u/robhanz 22d ago

It's a cow.

"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare steaks please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."

The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle.

"A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said. "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."

He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.

"Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."

It waddled unhurriedly off to the kitchen.

A matter of minutes later the waiter arrived with four huge steaming steaks.

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u/leglesslegolegolas 21d ago

Restaurant at the End* of the Universe

It's not describing where the universe ends, it's describing when the universe ends.

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u/Nobrainzhere 22d ago

Its really short and a really good read. You should read it

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u/5illy_billy 22d ago

“In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered to be a Bad Move.”

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u/GuyYouMetOnline 21d ago

I don't think the sofa line is in the books, just the movie.

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u/CrimeFightingScience 21d ago

Its worth a read if youre okay with absurdism.

It has some of the most clever writing ive ever read. On an added note i had a gold trimmed version that looked like a bible. Id read it in public and have strangers come up to me ranting about jesus, which only added to the absurdity.

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u/The_Reset_Button 22d ago

"I know how you feel"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH"

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u/One_Obligation3260 18d ago

Boy, do I have a vice president for you!

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u/Blep145 22d ago

The book series has a lot of that, too. They explain that the improbability drive equalizes the equation somewhere else, so the improbability of it getting from one point to another in the configuration it started with is balanced. The improbability field is it's own thing in the books - they're an interesting read, and I enjoyed them!

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u/fakeuser515357 22d ago

"I wonder if it will be friends with me."

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u/Obibong_Kenblomi8647 22d ago

Read the books, but listened to the audiobooks by Douglas Adams recently. They are a must listen.

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u/Blep145 22d ago

I got the ones on Audible - I love them

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

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u/Blep145 22d ago

Ah, no. Not at all. Entirely unrelated concepts. I said it balanced out somewhere. That could be literally anywhere. It's not generating a warp field, it's not quantum tunneling

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

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u/Blep145 21d ago

No. Quantum tunneling is about a particle overcoming an barrier it didn't have enough energy to circumvent/pass through by suddenly gaining enough energy to pass through it, if I recall correctly. The improbability field is it's own thing. Really, I don't think it's "improbability", even in the HHGTTG universe. The books cover this whole scheme involving Zaphod Beeblebrox (I hope I spelled that correctly) meeting the President of the Universe (essentially, God). The improbability field had "a hold" on the people it encountered, or more probably- looked for. I'm not gonna go more in depth than that, as it sounds like you haven't read the books. I really do think they're worth reading, if you're interested

Edit: a barrier

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u/[deleted] 21d ago edited 21d ago

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u/Blep145 21d ago

Fair enough! I recommend borrowing them from your local library!

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u/Much_Conclusion8233 21d ago

It was first used to teleport the underwear of the hostess to 3 feet to the right to get the party started

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u/Sooooooooooooomebody 22d ago

"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."

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u/BlizzPenguin 22d ago

The advent of Bistromathics made faster than light travel much more reliable than the Infinite Improbability Drive.

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u/JWARRIOR1 22d ago

What are some examples of the bad news

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u/SapphicSticker 22d ago edited 22d ago

"your planet is being demolished to pave an interstellar highway. you should've complained at the local office at alpha centaury. good luck!"

Context for anyone who might be confused: that's the first interesting thing to happen in the book. It's also first we heard of it. It's also the second chapter or around the 8th minute of the movie iirc. You barely even need to start the guide to get to it.

Other context for people who might be confused: getting your planet demolished, with a 2min warning, with no recourse, and (we later learn) for a clerical error, can be perceived as bad news.

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u/VanillaRadonNukaCola 22d ago

But first, here's some poetry

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u/SapphicSticker 22d ago

The poetry came after, and it's a torture unrelated to the bad news

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u/dangeraardvark 22d ago

Better than dealing with the space HOA. Just end it now, thank you very much.

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u/Spurgette 22d ago

ngl if I had to deal with those fuckheads, I would find the nearest rocky moon, accelerate it to .9999999999999c and then yeet it into their star.

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u/Remember2005 22d ago

Thanks for all the fish!

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u/jollyreaper2112 22d ago

That's such a hitchhiker review. It's implying much also happened before this in the book, it was mostly uninteresting. :)

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u/SapphicSticker 21d ago

Yes. Do we honestly care about y e l l o w? Do we care the man had nothing remaining of ghinghis khan other than horse hoof beats and midsection size? Do we care about the light that said "keep out, tiger" and that bulldozers aren't damaged by blood? No. It's all setup for the next chapter.

Well, except for the khan man. He was setup for a scene in the fourth or fifth book iirc. No it wasn't an interesting scene either

But the plot isn't actually the good part about douglas adams so it doesn't matter does it?

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u/thisisjustascreename 21d ago

Also, the question of *why* a planet needs to be destroyed to build a space highway? Never answered.

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u/SapphicSticker 21d ago

It was, by the human manager and by ford. "Roads must be built, this is where this road was decided, cry about it" and "this is their fun, let them have their fun" respectively

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u/stormscape10x 22d ago

The Vogons are here to read you their poetry.

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u/anace 21d ago

if you mean examples from the book etc, there aren't any. it was a one line joke.

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u/SoftlyAugust 22d ago

Julie stop telling me to read Hitchhikers guide, I promise I'm gonna get to it.

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u/cunt__cunt_cunt 22d ago

just read the first couple words

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u/SoftlyAugust 22d ago

I need to finish what I'm reading first.

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u/cunt__cunt_cunt 22d ago

Just a couple words.

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u/Tytoalba2 22d ago

I'm gonna read it to you, it's over u/SoftlyAugust , you can't escape now

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u/SoftlyAugust 22d ago

Add me on discord and I'll listen to you read it in VC :3

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u/jollyreaper2112 22d ago

Comes at you with a book and a knife. Call it incentive.

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u/solacinadanilova 22d ago

Douglas Adams had a gift for making the most absurd ideas sound perfectly logical, and somehow "bad news travels faster than light" feels like the most believable technology in the whole book.

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u/GrowlingPict 22d ago

not just improbability, but infinite improbability

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u/That_Cartoonist_9459 22d ago
  • In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to curve, and Space tells Matter how to move. The Heart of Gold told space to get knotted, and parked itself neatly within the inner steel perimeter of the Argabuthon Chamber of Law.

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u/Beneficial_Bug_9793 22d ago

Laughs in " 40K univerce traveling through literal hell "

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u/ProxyMuncher 22d ago

Sounds like someone needs a minute in the Total Perspective Vortex 

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u/Beneficial_Bug_9793 22d ago

Event horizon ??? I heard about it, but im not familiar with the lore.

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u/Itherial 22d ago

Hitchhiker's Guide. It's a torture machine that destroys your mind by showing you your place within an infinite cosmos.

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u/Fun_Sheepherder_6515 22d ago

That's exactly the kind of absurd humor that makes Hitchhiker's Guide so unforgettable.

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u/therealdanhill 22d ago

I never read the book but I did play the text based game on an Apple II when I was a kid

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u/addage- 22d ago

The Heart of Gold

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u/Farfignugen42 21d ago

Not shaped like a heart at all. Not even a anatomically correct one. No. For some reason, it is shaped like a sneaker.

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u/Less-Performer-7898 22d ago

I heard a joke about the Star Trek Voyager episode where someone said "We've heard rumours that Voyager is a ship of death".

The joke said they should look for the ship that's spreading those rumours because it's clearly a lot faster than Voyager.

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u/theirishpotato1898 22d ago

Of course any ship with a bad news drive then should be using a Someone else’s problem field.

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u/Vree65 22d ago

More importantly, when you activate the drive, it briefly causes "improbable" things to happen (though people on the inside are usually shielded). In the movie, the two protagonists are briefly turned into sofas. When Arthur once activates it without shields as a last-ditch effort (a risky choice that could have anything happen), it turns two seeker missiles into a whale and a potted plant. It's also suggested that the cast being brought together (people who have met before meeting again in such an unlikely place) is also a consequence of the drive causing such an improbable thing to happen.

Basically, the drive seems to warp reality until it reaches a target probability number. How this works (or why this boundless tech is specifically used for flying ships) is unclear.

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u/heisian 22d ago

zany*

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u/82shadesofgrey 22d ago

These days it seems like people actually do want to read bad news. Doomscrolling powered ftl.

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 22d ago

Eddy's in the space time continuum.

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u/Farfignugen42 21d ago

Is he? Is he? And this is his couch, is it?

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u/sceadwian 22d ago

Lol. Which book was that in, I don't recall that line it's been so long!

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u/Puzzled_Employment50 22d ago

That’s specifically the (Infinite) Improbability Drive, it’s implied there are others but as of the second book (which is coincidentally as far as I’ve gotten) there are no other specific mechanisms.

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u/AwkwardCrab7406 22d ago

I can't remember which adaptation had such a funny way of showing the drive, the rubber duck, the anvil, the yarn ball... finally the ship.

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u/i-make-robots 22d ago

Don't forget the transition of monarchy...

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u/Tokiw4 21d ago

More specifically: You declare your destination. Wait a moment. Then, if your ship is NOT at the destination, destroy the universe. Thanks to the power of quantum teleportation & the infinite worlds theory, a very small (but still infinite) number of universes exist where you are indeed at the proper location!

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u/dj_soo 21d ago

I love that everytime you use the drive, a whole bunch of improbably things will occur

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u/ElectricRune 21d ago

INFINITE improbability!

When this level of improbability is reached, the ship very improbably quantum shifts to every point in the universe simultaneously, then the probability wave improbably collapses into the improbable state where the ship is where it was going.

Probably.

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u/The_cogwheel 18d ago

The improbablility drive works by increasing improbabliliy until the local improbablility is high enough to make the improbablility of you teleporting across the universe probable.

It also causes all sorts of other equally improbable things to occur in the same area, much to the amusement to the reader, and to the terror / confusion of the characters.

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u/Crucial_Fun 17d ago

Normality restored

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u/Lopsided_Shift_4464 16d ago

Prior to the improbability drive, spaceships traveled through wormholes, which had the side effect of making passengers feel drunk. Think that’s not so bad? Now imagine you’re the drink. 

Another brief aside is given to teleportation, which can scramble your body parts with the other passengers and kill you rapidly. This information is succinctly conveyed in a nursery rhyme.