SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Over at Ars Technica, Annalee Newitz has an interesting review of John Scalzi's latest novel, The Collapsing Empire:
In his new novel The Collapsing Empire, bestselling writer John Scalzi builds a fascinating new interstellar civilization in order to destroy it. The Interdependency is a thousand-year-old interplanetary trade partnership in humanity's distant future. Its member planets were once connected to Earth by the Flow, a natural feature of space-time that allows ships to enter a kind of subspace zone. Once there, they can circumvent the unbreakable speed of light to travel between stars that are dozens of light years apart. What could go wrong?
Unfortunately, nobody is asking that question. Humanity has created an entire civilization that relies on the Flow and its "shoals," where ships can enter and exit. Planets are colonized purely based on their proximity to the shoals, not on habitability. The result is not unlike a medieval trade guild society whose populace happens to live in domed cities, buried caves, and artificial habitats, completely dependent on trade for resources.
The problem is that the Flow, like most natural features, has a tendency to change shape over time. As the novel opens, our protagonist, Cardenia, recently crowned emperox of the Interdependency, has just made a nasty discovery. She learns that her late father has secretly been funding a Flow physicist who has determined that every planet in the Interdependency will be cut off from the Flow within the next decade.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2017, @10:30PM
This is literally the plot of the series, only the flow is not a natural phenomenon, but a series of jumpgates (same basic principle as the other games from that era, notably Terminus and Tachyon: The Fringe, all possibly inspired by Babylon 5 given the timing.)
Basically Humanity discovers this network of jump nodes. They send sentient robots through to colonize it. Robots go out of control. Attempts to contain them lead to one of their developers turning them rogue. Human Colonies already outside of the solar system get cut off after the destruction of the original far-side gate to Terra, leading to hundreds of years without knowledge of Earth. X:BtF to X3TC are worth it. Albion Prelude might be fun as well but it was the first electronic only version, which I stopped playing. Rebirth ruined all the game mechanics people enjoyed, although there is now a patch as they prepare for their next game that supposedly brings it back to similiar mechanics from earlier games.)
Anyways, this just sounds like a novellization of the concept, and shifts in the 'Flow'/'Jumpgate Network' come to play an important part in the X series, as well as discovery of non-jumpgate forms of travel (which aren't nearly as safe, but offer otherwise impossible travel opportunities... if you don't die in the process.)