Evolution of a term
In fiction, holes in space between two systems are called:
- Gates
- Jumpgates
- Stargates
- Wormgate
- Wormholes
- Portals
- Subspace tunnels
- Boom tubes
- Fold space
In looking through my notes, I see I’ve used the acronym of CH. I scoured my notes trying to figure out what it stood for and found I started calling them slingshots.
I also found that I called the natives Grubbers and at one point Belters.
Okay, a CH is a congruency hole. Unlike a jumpgate, it evidently does not allow instantaneous transit between the two points.
Every explored system has an asteroid belt. Congruency Holes can be captured and used to push ships off at sub-FTL speeds.
There is a clear intent to use time dilation as the hardship that explorers have to endure as they try to make their fortunes. As such, the Congruency Holes are but one of the rates of interstellar travel:
4 different speeds of interstellar travel:
- standard - really slow (crew frozen)
- sub-FTL - time dilation is huge
- slingshot - time dilation is on the order of months
- FTL - no time dilation, but only the Phoenix has it
These two passages from my notes are but a day apart. They clearly show how my understanding of this universe was changing. The sub-FTL concept was no longer tied to the CH (or slingshot as it is now referred to) .
We also see the use of Phoenix as a starship. Cherryh also uses this name - yet another need for differentiation. Hmm, a good tie in would be Phoenix, a whaler. The name didn’t come from Cherryh’s usage, but I can’t prove that right now. For some reason I was thinking of the Morrow Project game, but I could be associating that with Keith Laumer’s short story “The Night Of The Trolls”, which was rewritten as The Stars Must Wait. After a civilization collapses, the hero wakes up from a test of cold sleep technology for starship travel. His ship was called the Prometheus.
