We have always been a race of lawbreakers. Tell us we can’t cross the Atlantic, or climb Everest, or artificially light our cities at night, or harness the atom, or transplant a human heart, or reach the Moon, and we do it primarily because all logic said we couldn’t. Now the laws of math [...]

A World Ship is a very large vehicle many tens of kilometres in length and having a mass of millions of tons, moving at a fraction of a per cent of the speed of light and taking hundreds of years to millennia to complete its journey. It is a self-contained, self-sufficient ship carrying a crew [...]

‘Robot probes – flashing through nearby star systems and radioing back their observations during a few hectic hours of transit … Barring accidents, they would continue speeding through the galaxy forever …’ Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth, 1986 As Project Icarus enters its next stage we will, slowly but surely, move towards a precise [...]

Introduction In fiction, a number of imaginary emissaries have sailed before Icarus into the dark interstellar ocean. There have been fewer tales featuring unmanned probes than manned starships like the Enterprise of Star Trek, purely because of the wider dramatic possibilities of the latter. But the depiction of interstellar probes in science fiction may serve [...]