Jaydium, your link to traveling through time and the galaxies

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Jaydium review

Faster-than-lightspeed (FTL) travel is the five hundred pound gorilla in the room of science fiction. The problem is: for the foreseeable future it will not be feasible to travel at such speeds. So science fiction has one of two choices. It can ignore the gorilla and race around galaxies using a warp drive taking no more time or experiencing no more paradox than would a train trip from New York or Chicago. The reader happily suspends their disbelief and enjoys the opera.

Or the science fiction can insist on admitting the presence of the gorilla. It says there has to be a method to travel astronomical distances in real time and we have to talk about it. We can’t mine the solar systems with carriers that go at such high velocities without coming up with an explanation of how this travel at light speed is achieved.

Happily, Jaydium is in the latter. And in fact the method used is the very title of the book. Jaydium is a secret ingredient that space rockets use to safely travel at 3 x 108 m/s2 (or faster) with no lingering after effects. You won’t show up sometime before your image does. No paradox.

Mind you there’s no explanation of how Jaydium exerts its properties to accomplish this, but that’s okay. I’m not looking for a chemical composition, atomic weight, or list of properties for the substance. For me, it’s good enough just to know the stuff exists and imparts fantastic speed. Any space hopping story that doesn’t in some way take the light speed limit into account, is just fantasy: a story of magic. But Jaydium does not do that, so we’re good.

Kudos to Deborah J. Ross for tying the concept of faster-than-light travel to time travel as well. It’s done in an oblique way, but it’s there nonetheless. And it makes sense that a substance such as Jaydium, that can impart bodacious speed to a jet would also somehow allow it to travel through time. This is not explicitly stated in the sotry, but you can see the two are tied together.

Very smart. A nice way to get a point across. Oh, yeah, there’s a story here too. Characters, a plot, aliens, danger. Everything you want in a smart, science fiction novel.

Well done.