We in the west are a bit too obsessed with moving fast.
What do we call a common trick in fantasy and SF that allows someone or something to move large distances in a short time? Teleportation. Spacetime stays the same, you just move through it very fast, whether physically or electronically.
By contrast, fantasy tales in China, Japan, and Korea, both modern and traditional, often show the protagonists practicing shukuchi [1], a trick that literally means "reduced earth" or "compressed land". Space is shrunk, and then you move through the shrunk space at a normal speed. It's basically warp drive, but imagined at least a thousand years before Star Trek. The guru's eyelashes don't even blow in the wind because, after all, he's just walking at his usual pace.
A change of paradigm indeed opens the door to a lot more possibilities, at least in theory if not in practice.
Quite a lot of our Sci-Fi's "FTL drives" are actually "Jump Drives". Take, for instance, Battlestar Glactica. They don't move through space, they jump to a new place within it.
What do we call a common trick in fantasy and SF that allows someone or something to move large distances in a short time? Teleportation. Spacetime stays the same, you just move through it very fast, whether physically or electronically.
By contrast, fantasy tales in China, Japan, and Korea, both modern and traditional, often show the protagonists practicing shukuchi [1], a trick that literally means "reduced earth" or "compressed land". Space is shrunk, and then you move through the shrunk space at a normal speed. It's basically warp drive, but imagined at least a thousand years before Star Trek. The guru's eyelashes don't even blow in the wind because, after all, he's just walking at his usual pace.
A change of paradigm indeed opens the door to a lot more possibilities, at least in theory if not in practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shukuchi