Caution, though, Watts' set and setting is so excessively decadent dark so he probably broke a knob in case of Blindpraxia, where he introduced no less than vampires(!) and failed to explain them properly effectively making them very flexible dei ex machinis to fix otherwise broken plot.
Blindsight worth reading indeed, depiction of scary aliens is excellent there, Echopraxia is completely disappointing disaster movie in the print form. I'm going to point you at The Island novelette and whole Sunflowers series if you can endure its decadent dark set&setting.
> Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit.
Not at all, you need to look at other sub-genres. The social, economic and military structures that form around slower than light travel are a mainstay of hard science fiction. "A Deepness in the Sky" is a great example. So is the first half of "Neptune's Brood" or the second half of "Accelerando". Any story that uses a generation ship as the setting, like "Hull Zero Three", also assumes sub-light travel. Or what would happen if present-day society discovered an alien race next door, like in "The Sparrow". Or maybe we need to make ourselves slightly less human to survive sub-light space travel. "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia" explore the philospohical ramifications of that. Even "Ender's Game" doesn't have FTL travel.
Now space opera almost universally assumes that FTL is possible. Though there are exceptions, Ian Banks "The Algebraist" is my favorite sub-light space opera.
edit: Some hard sci-fi will still use wormholes, either as a normal thing or a macguffin. FTL communication is also common. Though FTL comms are getting less common in modern hard sci fi. Us readers like this and it makes for convenient plot devices as comm lag leads to misunderstandings.
TV and movies are almost always space opera, with "The Expanse" being the only sub-light TV production that comes to mind, and "2001" for film. But I don't know as much about film as books.
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Caution, though, Watts' set and setting is so excessively decadent dark so he probably broke a knob in case of Blindpraxia, where he introduced no less than vampires(!) and failed to explain them properly effectively making them very flexible dei ex machinis to fix otherwise broken plot.
Blindsight worth reading indeed, depiction of scary aliens is excellent there, Echopraxia is completely disappointing disaster movie in the print form. I'm going to point you at The Island novelette and whole Sunflowers series if you can endure its decadent dark set&setting.
> Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit.
Not at all, you need to look at other sub-genres. The social, economic and military structures that form around slower than light travel are a mainstay of hard science fiction. "A Deepness in the Sky" is a great example. So is the first half of "Neptune's Brood" or the second half of "Accelerando". Any story that uses a generation ship as the setting, like "Hull Zero Three", also assumes sub-light travel. Or what would happen if present-day society discovered an alien race next door, like in "The Sparrow". Or maybe we need to make ourselves slightly less human to survive sub-light space travel. "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia" explore the philospohical ramifications of that. Even "Ender's Game" doesn't have FTL travel.
Now space opera almost universally assumes that FTL is possible. Though there are exceptions, Ian Banks "The Algebraist" is my favorite sub-light space opera.
edit: Some hard sci-fi will still use wormholes, either as a normal thing or a macguffin. FTL communication is also common. Though FTL comms are getting less common in modern hard sci fi. Us readers like this and it makes for convenient plot devices as comm lag leads to misunderstandings.
TV and movies are almost always space opera, with "The Expanse" being the only sub-light TV production that comes to mind, and "2001" for film. But I don't know as much about film as books.