Mystic-bent SF premise

[dvandom]

Recently, I was thinking about Ursula LeGuin's "Rocannon's World" and related books, where they had an FTL comm (the ansible) and FTL ships that had to run on computer control because FTL was intrinsically fatal. So humans moved around on high-STL ships, but in emergencies a supply drop or bombing run could be carried out by a robot ship.

Rocannon's World is fairly hard SF, which makes me think that fatal FTL is merely an engineering issue there. After all, FTL allows matter to survive. It lets complex systems like autopilots survive. So it couldn't be an impossible barrier in hard SF. Maybe there's some sort of radiation that permeates FTL-space, but that just means better shielding. I don't recall LeGuin going into detail beyond "it's fatal", though. It's mainly a plot device to allow some FTL but still play Forever War-style relativistic dislocation.

Still, that got me thinking. In a less hard SF setting, a rather neat way to make sure humans could develop FTL but never travel via it would be to posit that not only do souls exist, but that the soul-body connection cannot keep up past the speed of light. So an ensouled being who hopped aboard an FTL cruiser would have their soul ripped away by the voyage. Maybe they could reunite if the ship went back to the starting point soon enough, but probably not.

This would, of course, lead to an AI arms race, where various factions would want to create the most intelligent soulless life possible in order to get the most benefit from FTL. A story could hinge on finding that souls are an inevitable emergent process that come up whenever self-awareness arrives, so you'd have dead AIs as well, and need to balance on the knife's edge between maximum intellect and ensoulment. A golem class AI, if you will. In fact, I've started to think of such a setting as "Golem".

Okay, someone probably already wrote an entire series of novels around this premise, but I haven't read any of 'em yet. :)

Comments

[aberrantangels]

This compares with an ancient Arcturan proverb: 'However fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan Megacamel.' This would mean, in these days of hyperspace and Improbability Drive, that most people's souls are wandering unprotected in deep space in a state of some confusion, and this would account for a lot of things.
— The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Fit the Tenth (fourth of the Secondary Phase), "In which our heroes have some close encounters with others and themselves"