Slow Time Between the Stars (The Far Reaches, #6)

by John Scalzi

Fire, or the management of it, is a single technological achievement. Everything after that is more complicated. Even the wheel is not a single thing—what is a wheel without an axle?

Humans yearned for the stars because, in their imagination, space was space they could use, filled with planets and moons and orbital stations large enough to be their own nations, to be traversed in the time it takes to go from one airport to another. In reality space is mostly nothing, more nothing than humans have ever comprehended or even could comprehend.