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The Wormhole Series
Future Chron Universe (FCU)
First, what is the Future Chron Universe? Future Chron is short for Future Chronology, and it is the universe I (D.W. Patterson) created to write my first stories and novels in.
It is a Hard Science Fiction universe. That is all the science and technology, as far-fetched as it may seem, has been derived from an existing scientific paper (sometimes a very speculative science paper) or technology and has been extrapolated into the future.
For instance, wormhole travel. While it is very interesting to write in a universe where the speed of light limits contact among people (see my novelette The Cloud) it requires a lot of book-keeping to tell a story whose settings span several light years. For me it is like the difference between pre-internet and post-internet. Before the internet books available were limited and sometimes difficult to obtain mostly because they were costly to transport and keep in their physical form, paper. It could take weeks if you had to order a book or get it through an inter-library loan. Now with books as bits, it takes only moments. And you can have the complete works of many authors (whether you will ever read it all or not is a different problem). I have the complete works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells on my e-reader and love reading parts here and there.
Anyway, to get back to wormhole travel. The wormhole drive as invented in the FCU greatly changed the time it took to travel between stars. For instance, the travel time between Earth and Alpha Centauri went from several years to the blink of an eye. It takes more time to safely position the spaceship and open a wormhole than the actual transit takes. While the technology of wormhole travel is nowhere near actualization, I have not read any scientific papers saying it is physically impossible. Yes, you need a negative mass the size of Jupiter, but we know the Casimir Effect can supply negative energy. There is some reason to believe that it will be hard to scale to the levels needed but that is an engineering problem not a scientific one, yet. By the way, I believe that originally, it was believed you would need a negative mass the size of a galaxy, so reducing this to a single giant planet is progress.
Of course, the development of the wormhole drive also changes the politics of the FCU. It becomes harder to maintain freedom and independence when the powerful can more easily project that power. But that is much like our shared world where we feel pressure to homogenize our thoughts because otherwise they are in conflict with the greater number or the more powerful. And I think for those who have no real interest in the science of the FCU (which of course fascinates me endlessly) the conflict between personal freedom and public expectation may make an interesting read.
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