A New Take On A Well Established Premise

Listen folks, I know some of you are going to point fingers and scream about the physical impossibility of real world Faster Than Light travel. I'm not convinced that you're right, because, although science says it can't be done, science screws up all the time. Seriously, it was scientifically proven that woman couldn't travel on trains because their wombs would come flying out of their body and that no human being could travel faster than the speed of sound without suffocating. 

And anyway, who cares, we're talking about Science Fiction here! FTL travel happens all the time!

So listen, here's what I'm thinking:

Yes, Star Trek has Warp Drive. Yes, Star Wars has Lightspeed. Honor Harrington has hyper. I'm told that Warhammer 40K burns psychics, but I haven't read the books. I need to start. Event Horizon had that spiky, ball thing. Stargate has the star gate. Battlestar Galactica has a jump drive, as does Battletech. The Four Horsemen Universe has a pretty unique take on both gate technology, similar to the gates in Babylon 5, and hyperspace that has to be seen to be believed. 

I could go on for days. Honestly, I'm still debating whether Stargate really counts or not, too but that's not the point.

The point is that we need one concrete thing we can ask about. One all-powerful, overarching concept that can get us into the nitty-gritty of what we love. Because, honestly, if all we wanted was action and cool characters we'd be reading Tom Clancy instead of David Weber. (That's not a slam against Tom Clancy. Dude can flat out write. I'm just saying that he doesn't have the fancy window dressing we're used to as fans of SF/F.) What we need is the Fwoosh button.

Yep, I said it. The Fwoosh button.

Think about it this way:

When Sulu, takes the ship to warp, he's pressing the Fwoosh Button. When Ivanova orders the White Star Fleet through a gate, she's pushing the Fwoosh Button. When Jim Carthwright takes the Cavaliers through the gate and into hyperspace, he's pressing the Fwoosh Button. When Han Solo takes the Millennium Falcon to Lightspeed, he's hitting the Fwoosh Button, Well, probably. I mean, it's the Falcon and it kinda only works when it wants to, but you know what I mean. Actually, he's hitting the Fwoosh Button either way. Sometimes it just doesn't work. The bottom line here is that when your favorite character does whatever they do to get things moving quickly, they're hitting the Fwoosh Button. 

Instead of referring to FTL travel as FTL travel, and having to ask, "How do they do Faster Than Light?" every time somebody tells you about a new series, you just say, "How does the Fwoosh button work?" or "Describe the Fwoosh Button."

Your life will thus have been greatly enhanced and simplified by the saving of several seconds that you would otherwise have spent speaking a longer phrase that you no longer need to speak because I have provided you with a way to shorten your sentences, save your breath and eschew obsfucation by using a singularly concise term with which I have provided you free of charge and with no hope of recompense simply out of my magnanimity as a human being and through my deep and abiding care for the well-being of all around me combined with my confirmed affection for brevity and all of its benefits.

Seriously folks, keep it short if you can. It is of utmost importance to express your meaning in as few words as possible as this will allow your audience to understand the maximum amount of words that you have spoken because you have refused to confuse them with an overabundance of verbiage. This is desirable for many reasons.

So...

The Fwoosh Button is important. It will save you time.

I like this concept, because, at least among stories that involve faster than light travel, it's all encompassing. When you're describing a new book/show/movie/series to a friend you can just say, "Then he hit the Fwoosh Button" when describing what happened in the book instead of trying to walk some goofball through the 9780768768687687968976789689768968976789698768969876986987696 steps behind engaging a Warshawski Sail and setting off into hyper. There will also be no need to explain military compensators, Alpha nodes, Beta nodes, hyperspace bands, hyper limits...

Yeah, Fwoosh button that stuff and you're good. 

Okay, so Honorverse fans are either laughing or offended right now. The rest of you are confused. I'm trying to help avoid all of  the confusion by moving everything forward in a conversation using the Fwoosh Button. Seriously. Try it.