I have a JavaScript calculator on one of my pages where you an compute the time for a long relativistic space voyage. I used it in an unsold story that I called The Long Run. A person traveling at an acceleration of 1G can make it 100 light years in 9 years. What the F?!#@*, you might yell. You can’t go 100 light years in 9 years that’s 11 times the speed of light. Yes you can. People on earth that are watching will see that it takes you 102 years. Because of relativistic time dilation, your subjective time will be 9 years. The round trip will take you 18 years, but when you get back it will be 202 years later. My story dealt with the economics of such a trip and a very long term love relationship.
I am considering blocking out a novel – really a series of episodes – also called The Long Run. In this novel a large group of explorers will take off in ships that can accelerate at 1G for long periods of time. They will all head for a star about 1000 light years away. A round trip will be useless because they would return to earth 2000 plus years later and things would be so different that it would be like visiting another world. Each of a dozen or so teams would take a different path to the distant target and meet 60 years later, subjective time. Along the way, they would discover strange worlds. They would either hibernate or raise families between stars in the large exploration ships. Some ships would find beautiful planets along the way and stop to settle. Some ships would have accidents and some ships might be destroyed by aliens. Positioned along the way there would be drop points where each ship could leave logs of their journeys and other ships could stop and read the news, so to speak.
This would be similar to Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, but would span more than one ship and it would not end with rescue by super C ships. It would be more like Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time. My idea would be more straight adventure involving an series of epic journeys that converge.
This might make a good anthology, but since it is episodic, I could write alternating chapters about the different ships and have them intersect some times. There would have to be a pervasive evil waiting for them. Maybe there is a series of space mines meant to discourage space travel left by some long dead race. Maybe there is a distributed intelligence that wants to destroy the ships. Maybe there is a hidden secret about the target planet and we discover why this planet out of all others was chosen as a meeting place.
Maybe I’ll never get around to it, but I could write some chapters as stand-alone stories. It could be fun.
One Comment
You had me going until you mentioned space aliens. I would have inserted other more believable circumstances in there, like maybe a disease of some kind or other space anomalies, real or imagined. You could also toss an inter-ship uprising or two in there to increase conflict. It's the subjective time thing that throughs people off.
Sounds like a fun project.