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• The Holtzman Effect: In the Dune series, the spice melange was able to increase your lifespan, heighten your senses, and let you see safe paths through the space-time continuum. Of course, in order to use this last benefit, you had to live in a micro-gravity environment while being constantly saturated with spice. Plus, it would mutate your body into something fairly hideous. However, in order to actually fold space and make this travel happen, you'd need a Holtzman Drive, which used subatomic energy fields to fold space and let you travel over vast distances in the blink of an eye. Without a navigator, you might not make it to your final destination.
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• The Infinite Improbability Drive: In order to get around traveling over the enormous distances in space, Douglas Adams created this drive in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to avoid "all of that tedious mucking about in hyperspace." It was invented by a student who was sweeping up after a party, and decided that if such a machine was a virtual impossibility, then it had to logically by a finite improbability and went from there. Basically, when you activate the drive (which is an electronic brain hooked up to a Brownian motion generator... like a cup of tea) it causes you to pass through every point in the universe at exactly the same time. Then you just drop down the improbability levels, and hope you come out where you need to be.
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• The Stargate: In the universe of Stargate, you can travel over huge interstellar distances simply by stepping into the giant Stargate, and popping out on the other side where another giant gate exists. You could select which gate you wanted to travel to by dialing a "code" on the gates and locking the nine different chevrons into place. They were constructed as a network by a race of ancient alien beings, and basically open up wormholes for travelers to jaunt through.
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• Jaunting: In Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt" (found in the Skeleton Crew anthology) the technology exists to teleport people over huge distances. However, you have to be put to sleep for the trip, and revived on the other end. If you travel through while awake, very bad things happen. In fact, they send a convicted murderer through while awake, in exchange for him getting a full pardon. When he comes out the other end, he mutters "It's eternity in there" and then dies of a massive heart attack. In the story, a father tells his children about these bad things, and of course the son holds his breath when they hose them down with sleeping gas, so he can see what it's like. It ain't very pretty.
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• Artificial Black Holes: In the movie Event Horizon, the ship (of the same name) creates artificial black holes by using a gravity drive, and this allows them to fold space in order to travel large distance quickly. As usually happens with a technology like this, something goes wrong along the way. In this case, the ship literally ends up in hell, and seems to become possessed by an evil entity. Everyone goes a little bit nuts, Sam Neill tears his own eyes out, and that's about enough to make you not want to try out this method of travel.
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• Cryogenic freezing/sleep: In Alien and countless other science fiction books/movies, travelers often enter a suspended animation hypersleep so they don't go insane from space madness when their trip takes 40 years to complete. The downside is, everyone else you know in the world will continue aging at a normal rate, while you're frozen in place. This is why all of Ripley's friends and her daughter were dead once she was found drifting in Aliens some 57 years later. This doesn't mean that the ship you're in will be traveling faster than the speed of light, but when you wake up on the other side it'll feel pretty instantaneous, which is what really matters.
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• The Wave Motion Engine: Whether you know it as Starblazers, or under the original title Space Battleship Yamato, they both traveled the same way via the Wave Motion engine. This enormous device powered the entire ship, allowed them to fire the Wave Motion Gun, and also had to ability to make them jump quickly through space using tachyon energy. Since they had to travel 148,000 lightyears to bring back a device that would cleanse the earth of deadly radiation, this came in pretty handy. However, this could not be used constantly, since both the place of origin and the destination had to be locked in "phase," and if this wasn't done correctly the ship could destroy the universe.
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• FTL Drives: In the world of Battlestar Galactica, the ships of the colonial fleet and the Cylons alike both travel over large distances by using FTL drives. While a bit of a misnomer, since the ship actually teleports instantaneously rather than rocketing at speeds great than the speed of light (a la Star Trek) to a new destination, it still has the desired effect. The process by which this works is not actually discussed on the show, but we do know that the drives are powered by the ore Tylium, and that ships can even jump out of a planet's atmosphere. The constantly jumping episode "33" shows just how much they rely on this technology, and how the Cylons use it to stay a step behind, or a step ahead in some cases.
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You've said that optimistic, planet-hopping science fiction leads people to believe we can abuse the Earth as much as we want, because we can just colonize space. Why is that?

Are you sure planet-hopping SF is optimistic? I find a lot of it escapist and genuinely despairing. I'm thinking of commercial SF, say movies like Lost in Space, where a destroyed environment is simply the spur to get us hopping across star systems in search of a beautiful new planet. To me that's a counsel of despair. We'll destroy this planet, it seems to say, so we need to find a nice new one.

An optimist, at least this optimist, feels that reducing carbon output and finding ways to bind it are just the kind of problem that human beings are good at solving. We can and we will strike a balance with the rest of this planet. How good we are at it will determine how many of us will die and how much of our culture we get to take with us.

But most science-fiction fans are often the greenest people around. They all drive hybrids!

I have no doubt your friends are green. They are probably just the people to be able to understand the chemistry behind global warming and to believe that the future can be very different from our comfortable life now. I'm sure they also know that you can't approach the speed of light without time dilation effects and that faster-than-light travel is highly unlikely. And as SF fans, they probably read the better SF novels.

But the better SF novels are not the SF that actually plays a perceptible role in society. The SF that has impact and that performs a powerful social function is media SF. Media SF continually and relentlessly shows large sections of society that it will be easy to fly to new green habitable worlds. This may be the wrong message when there's a strong chance that we only have this one planet.

Isn't it too soon to conclude that planets like Earth are rare in our galaxy?

Of course it's too soon. But it's way too late not to acknowledge that we may not get very far into the galaxy. That will limit the number of Earth-likes within range. The best we can hope for is anti-matter drives that get us up to a good percentage of the speed of light. That puts, by my rough reckoning, a horizon on how far we can get. I'd say about 30 light years at the outside.

And the term "Earth-type planet'' does not mean one in which there is oxygen, abundant water etc. It means a planet that has rock, is likely to be within a range of temperatures and which may have water and has gravity within a certain range. In all likelihood, it means a planet that needs terraforming. Let's consider the cost, difficulty and time needed to terraform Mars. Imagine having to do that across a 20 light year gap. It would make terraforming Mars the better option.

So why does so much science fiction cling to the faster-than-light drive?

Various reasons, many of which simply have to do with ease of storytelling. FTL gets you places faster, saving plot time. Lots of lovely green worlds give you an assortment of exotic locales. It absolutely makes sense to have galaxy busting spacecraft jumping all over the galaxy if all you want to do is write a fun story.

It sounds like you want to tell SF writers to eat their spinach. Is there any way to describe "mundane SF" that stresses the exciting story possibilities instead?

It's only spinach for writers. You have to be original, and there are fewer magic wands to get you out of plot difficulties. But the theory is, that once we get cooking on the new tropes, we'll have new and different futures to show. I'm co-editing the Mundane SF issue of Interzone with Julian Todd, and it does seem that our next step is to stop saying what we don't use, and start to pointing towards the fiction we're aiming at.

That issue has some neat near-future stories and some far-future stories, particularly a good one from Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It's also got a story from Elisabeth Vonarburg, and work for some relatively new authors as well. One of the stories I wrote for the issue was a far-future Mundane story, which I liked, but it was too long for the issue at 15K.

What topics are you hoping to see mundane SF stories cover?

I'd like to see far- as well as near-future Mundane stories. I'm very hopeful given the range of stories we got for the issue. We did get a lot of climate-change or pandemic stories. But we also got a lot of speculation on the impact of technology on religion, genetics, psychology and psychotherapy. We got sailing stories, closed environment stories, lots of post-cyberpunk stories.

There also seems to be a link between writing mundane and being more concerned with gender issues or material of interest to women. I have no idea why that would be, but it's good to see.

What are some examples of mundane science fiction that you recommend?

Charles Stross' novel Glasshouse is self-identified Mundane. Ken MacLeod's next novel is self-identified mundane. I don't know if it's out in the States, but Anil Menon's first novel The Beast with Nine Billion Feet is mundane SF. The line we take is this: authors aren't mundane but stories are. This leaves authors free to write something else. The only person who can say if its author was playing the mundane game is the author him/herself. So it is kind of fun to spot stories that might have been Mundane, but unless the authors agree, well, it's not Mundane. My own personal might-have-been-Mundane favorite is Gattaca. Also lots of Philip K Dick, Samuel Delaney and J G Ballard.