Mass Teleportation



When a very large number of people, a whole fleet, an entire city, or even a whole planet, is sent to another place, another time, or another dimensional plane.

A Mass Teleportation through time is more specifically referred to as an ISOT (acronym for Island in The Sea of Time, a novel by S.M. Stirling in which the entire island of Nantucket is teleported back to the Bronze Age).

The phenomenon may be deliberate, but is usually accidental, unexplainable, or the work of an Alien Space Bats. When an ISOT takes place on a small scale, the victim is Trapped in the Past.

A subcategory of Teleportation Tropes.

Anime and Manga

 * In the anime series Macross the entire superdimensional fortress and surrounding city are teleported just beyond the planet Pluto during a desperate attempt to flee an overwhelming alien assault.
 * The Protodevelin do this to the city section of the titular Macross 7. The New Macross class colony ships are designed to do this voluntarily as well.
 * Hell's Gate and Heaven's Gate in Darker than Black may qualify. It's left kind of vague whether the things were teleported to another dimension or are just completely sealed off.
 * In Mahou Sensei Negima, these sort of things work like out-right airports for wizards. The background story also mentioned massive use of this teleportation type to transport an entire army and change the course of war.
 * In Dragonball Z, Goku & co use the Dragon Balls to wish for all Nameks to be teleported to earth.
 * Pokémon the Rise of Darkrai: Palkia moves the town to a new dimension to hide in from Dialga.
 * In the Rayearth Alternate Continuity OAV, Clef teleports every last bit of animal life on Earth (except the Magic Knights and Mokona) to... some other dimension. This is to keep them safe from the invasion from Cephiro, and conveniently enough lets the Knights and their foes demolish Tokyo with abandon.
 * In Zipang a modern Japanese Aegis destroyer named the JDS Mirai gets inexplicably teleported back to the Battle of Midway.
 * In Bleach
 * In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, it turns out that

Comic Book

 * One time, in Ultimate Comics: Avengers 3, the Triskelion was facing a vampire invasion. So Captain America used the hammer of Thor (Mjölnir) to teleport them all to the Iranian desert, were the vampires were killed by the daylight. The reason for not teleporting the Triskelion into a desert area of an ally (e.g. Israel, Egypt, Saudi-Arabia) but to that of an enemy ("Great Satan", you remeber) is, that it would've been less badass (You appear in broad daylight on enemy territory and they can DO NOTHING!!).
 * A Justice League of America graphic novel had the heroes fighting an advanced race of aliens who stole Earth (along with other inhabited planets) in order to chronicle the races' various beliefs of the afterlife, since for all the aliens' advances, they were reaching the end of their mortal lives and were as clueless about what happens next as everyone else.
 * The starting premise of Green Lantern: Mosaic; a lonely and mentally unstable Guardian of the Universe snatches communities from various planets and places them all on the Guardians' abandoned homeworld Oa.
 * Guardians of the Galaxy once had the entire population of a planet teleported to a safer solar system.
 * In Cavewoman, the entire town of Marshville is transported back to the prehistoric past.
 * In Phil Foglio's Buck Godot, the titular character convinces the only life-form in the galaxy capable of true teleportation (known simply as "The Teleporter") to help out with a small problem: the star around which a heavily-populated planet orbits is about to go nova. Buck suggests that the population could be distributed to several convenient planets elsewhere, but the Teleporter offers a rather simpler solution that simultaneously resolves one of Buck's personal problems.
 * Actually that's two problems with separate solutions (both involving teleporting). Teleporting X-Tel to Kooblen solves Buck's (and everyone else's) problem with them. On the next page we learn that the Teleporter saved the doomed planet by moving the whole planet to a different system.
 * Watchmen has Doctor Manhattan using this to disperse a large scale riot by teleporting every rioter back to their home. As per the Crapsack World nature of Watchmen, multiple teleportees die of heart attacks on arrival.

Fanfic

 * The event that transported Ryanverse Earth and its surroundings into the BattleTech universe, in An Entry With a Bang, is even referred to as an ISOT event, in a nod to Stirling's novel, and was teleported into the Grantville cluster.

Film

 * The Philadelphia Experiment: A World War Two destroyer and a Present Day city get teleported into a time vortex caused by an experimental Cloaking Device.
 * The Final Countdown: Aircraft carrier Nimitz gets inexplicably teleported from 1980 to early December, 1941.
 * Similarly to the Doctor Who epsiode below,

Literature

 * Battlefield Earth: The Psychlos teleport an army and an airforce to Earth.
 * Island in the Sea of Time: Where ISOT comes from.
 * Left Behind: The Rapture is, after all, a type of Mass Teleportation.
 * In the Arthur C. Clarke novel Time's Eye, a parallel universe world is built using chunks of Earth from different parts of time. This includes Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, and their respective armies. And a colonial British regiment (with Rudyard Kipling) and a Soyuz capsule orbiting the earth.
 * The West Virginia mining town of Grantville being teleported to 1632 Thuringia in the 1632 saga by Eric Flint.
 * In the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Mr. Strange teleports an entire European city to North America to save it being attacked in the Napoleonic wars. He remembered to put it back (although some of the regiments, who deserted, were not brought back with it). However, he neglected to move another city (moved to make it match the maps) back to where it originally was. He also switched the places of two churches, mostly to demonstrate the theory, and forget to put them back.
 * This is what everyone thinks happened to all of Europe in Darwinia (the book, not the game). Actually, they're.
 * John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy, inspired by The Final Countdown (see above), depicts a military task force that somehow gets sent back in time from 2021 to 1942.
 * In the Godspeaker Trilogy, Emperor Han and his witchmen teleport an entire armada to fight the forces of the Mijaki.
 * In a Star Trek: Voyager Expanded Universe novel, a glitch in a race's planet-wide transporter system causes anyone on the planet to be transporter to a parallel universe every few hours. The real problem starts when one of the universes does not have this planet, so billions of people get dumped into outer space every few hours. Cue the Cree of that universe's Voyager trying to figure out (and failing) how to keep billions alive without a planet.
 * A novel whose name escapes me starts with a mountain town and the surrounding area transported to an alien planet. A possible explanation is that this planet exists slightly off-phase and has for a brief moment come in contact with Earth. However, the displaced people aren't too worried about how they got there, as they must now focus on survival in this strange world.
 * In Dune, the Spacing Guild heighliners are enormous starships that instantly travel anywhere by folding space. They are described as so large that an entire planet's population and all of their equipment will take up only a small portion of the cargo space.
 * In the Orson Scott Card novel Enchantment, a 747 is magicked in flight back to pre-Medieval Russia.
 * Long before the story begins in It's a Good Life, the monster psychic child teleported his entire town away from the rest of the Earth. (Either that, or he destroyed the rest of the Earth. No one is sure.)
 * The Animorphs novel The Ellimist Chronicles has the Ellimist move the entire Earth halfway around its orbit to keep Crayak from destroying it.
 * The Charles Stross novella Missile Gap is about the citizens of Earth dealing with the planet being transported to a flat disk millions of miles across during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
 * The conclusion to Peter F Hamilton's Nights Dawn Trilogy sees the entire human Confederation, star systems and all, teleported It should be noted that this is over 900 systems and is estimated to be almost a trillion people,  Ostensibly, it's so humanity can start working away from it's current economic and political system

Live Action TV

 * Entire planets get teleported around the universe with disturbing regularity in Doctor Who.
 * The titular world of the Fourth Doctor adventure "The Pirate Planet" teleports itself around other planets so as to more easily strip-mine them dry, while pretending that the mineral deposits are the world's own mines.
 * Earth and several other worlds being stolen by the Daleks at the end of thirtieth/fourth season.
 * Andromeda has the entire solar systems of Tarn Vedra and Ral Parthia being teleported off to a pocket dimension to hide them from a Magog invasion.
 * Ben moves the whole island in the fourth season of Lost.
 * The 4400: people are abducted individually at various times and places throughout the 20th century, but all 4,400 of them get teleported back simultaneously to the same location.
 * Battlestar Galactica. Although actually an example of an FTL drive, the moment when Galactica dives into the atmosphere of New Caprica, then jumps out moments before it Colony Drops the entire settlement, could apply. One good touch is there's a tremendous CRACK! and immediate whirlwind as air rushes back into the space where the massive battlestar once was.
 * Voyager: The entire starship Voyager is transported inside the Voth's city ship in one episode.
 * This is also the premise of the series.
 * In The Outer Limits episode "Feasibility Study", a neighborhood is teleported to another planet.
 * In Fringe an entire building is transported from the alternate universe into our own, smack-dab on top of its counterpart building. Things get pretty weird...
 * The Event relied on teleportation a lot, most notably in the first two episodes when a plane is teleported across the country, and in the finale where.
 * In the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Series Fauxnale Doomsday, Rita teleported the entire population of Angel Grove to one of her dark dimensions. If they remained trapped there too long they'd vanish.
 * On an episode of Sliders, they travel to a world where Quinn's double has slid the entire population of his Earth to another dimension except for himself.
 * On an episode of Sliders, they travel to a world where Quinn's double has slid the entire population of his Earth to another dimension except for himself.

Tabletop RPG

 * GURPS Fantasy's Yrth setting. A phenomenon called the Banestorm transports collections of living creatures to the world of Yrth from other universes.
 * In Dungeons & Dragons, this is how the demiplane of Ravenloft came into existence: chunks of land from other planes were teleported into it.
 * The plane of Rath in Magic: The Gathering was built from a shapeshifting material called flowstone, with the idea that it could be made to resemble another world and then overlay itself on top of it. All part of a complex invasion plan. That actually works.
 * In the same rough plotline, the planeswalker Teferi teleports an entire continent away to enable its people to escape the said invasion.
 * In the fluff to the tabletop game Robo Gear, the imperial empire of Terra's last ditch attempt to try to regain control of the galaxy was to build a colossal Jump Drive and teleport the entire planet from star system to star system. My memory is a little sketchy but I believe the entire earth was destroyed.
 * Part of the world's backstory of The Dark Eye has a big chunk of jungle inhabited by various intelligent reptile species being ripped from the land and transported/turned into a pocket dimension, possibly to avoid getting overrun by humans.
 * The Republic of Japan in Rifts is a collection of three (formerly four) cities from the time before the Coming of the Rifts that was teleported into a pocket dimension after a group of scientists performed a teleportation experiment at the exact moment the disaster hit. They end up spending a few days there, then come back three hundred years later.
 * In the Star Fleet Universe of Star Fleet Battles, the planet Aurora mysteriously teleported from the Federation (in the SFU's Beta Sector) into the Omega Sector.

Video Games

 * In the RTS Achron humanity has integrated teleportation throughout society, with mass teleportation between star systems happening on a daily basis. Then they are attacked by aliens that not only are even better at teleportation, but have mastered Time Travel as well.
 * In multiplayer games it is not unheard of for players to teleport, or even chronoport their entire army.
 * This is done in the backstory of the MMO Ryzom. Apparently the technique utilizes rainbows.
 * In the Neverwinter Nights Hordes of the Underdark campaign, you encounter an entire Avariel city that has been teleported to the underdark. (And everyone's personality twisted)
 * Archmages in Warcraft III can teleport entire armies to allied units or buildings. The scroll of teleportation is similar, but can only be used to return to a town hall.
 * In World of Warcraft, Jaina Proudmoore is specifically referred to as a master of this skill (and she uses it to good effect at the end of the Wrathgate storyline).
 * Cataclysm added this as a perk for high level guilds, called "Have group, will travel" it allows one person to summon up to 39 other people to their location instantly.
 * The Protoss Arbiter in StarCraft can teleport a moderately-sized strike force to it.
 * Ditto for the Protoss Mothership in Star Craft 2.
 * As a matter of fact, this is how ALL Protoss units and buildings are “built.” Instead of being constructed from local materials, local materials are merely used to fuel powerful wormholes that teleport over finished items from the heavily industrialized Protoss homeworld. This allows a skilled player to rapidly Teleport Spam an entire base into existence with a single Worker Unit.
 * The Xen creatures in Half-Life could be considered an example, but the Combine in Half-Life 2 are definitely one: they teleport massive armies to Earth and take over within hours.
 * According to some interpretations, the Combine even teleported in the Citadel, their massive headquarters building. Also in Episode 2, the Aperture Science Borealis might count, since it's an entire ship, and a reference to the Philadelphia Experiment.
 * The Jump Point Beacon in Haegemonia allowed the player to teleport entire fleets across space in an instant and even bypass the wormholes usually required to travel between systems. Unfortunately there is a small chance of your fleet failing to arrive at that location, sometimes appearing somewhere else sometime later, sometimes never reappearing at all.
 * In the lesser known game WarWind 2: Human Onslaught, a human military base is teleported from the Arctic into the alien world of Yavaun.
 * In Suikoden IV, Viki (the ditzy Time Traveling teportation mage who appears in every game of the main series) is able to teleport the heroes' entire naval fleet (consisting of up to 5 battleships, if you do well enough in the naval battles). And it doesn't even seem to be remotely difficult for her; there's no MP cost, no sign of strain, and no limit to how often she can do it. Of course, there's no reason to think that teleporting multiple warships would be more difficult than teleporting a century back in time, something so easily that Viki literally did it by accident. Oddly enough, though, your "master" strategist never thinks of putting her ridiculously powerful ability to strategic use.
 * In Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic learns how to manipulate time and space via Chaos Control. When he and Shadow, both in super form, perform Chaos Control simultaneously, they're capable of teleporting space stations back into orbit.
 * And in Sonic Chronicles we discover that several civilizations from multiple dimensions have been sucked into a realm called the Twilight Cage. Exactly why this is happening is Left Hanging, but the proposed theory is that someone or something is sealing away cultures that become too powerful.
 * Even though personal transportation and FTL travel use the same technology in Marathon, it was still quite a shock to all observers when an ancient Jjarro device was used to.
 * The Chronosphere in Command & Conquer Red Alert, which is mentioned to be the result of the Philadelphia Experiment (above).

Webcomics

 * In this Order of the Stick comic, Vaarsuvius teleports the entire Azure City refugee fleet to another continent.
 * And a few strips earlier it was noted one of the souls he is spliced with had teleported armies.
 * One of the big secrets of the Unicorn Jelly setting is that . And it was neither the first nor last time this occurs.
 * In Starslip the entire human race and all of its planets get transported halfway across the universe after the main characters annoy the Anthelerix.
 * In Schlock Mercenary, the king of a gigantic space station that contains a city of millions hires the protagonists to build an emergency evacuation system that can teleport the entire contents of the station safely to a habitable planet.

Toys

 * In Bionicle, the island of Destral is equipped with special technology that causes the entire island to teleport.

Western Animation

 * On Justice League Unlimited, A.M.A.Z.O. once moved a planet out of the dimension on his trip back to Earth. More than that, the planet was Oa, home of the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who give the Green Lantern Corps their rings. If they couldn't stop A.M.A.Z.O., you know the Justice League's chances didn't look good.
 * The Prison Planet in Shadow Raiders aka War Planets. Each and every planet in the cluster is equipped with a World Engine which sprouts world-sized rockets, seals the atmosphere, and allows the entire thing to travel across space. The exception is the Prison Planet, whose World Engine consists of a massive teleport unit. During the Grand Finale, the Prison Planet is sacrificed to the Beast and its Engine is activated, whisking the foe to the other end of the galaxy.
 * This was the main goal of the Highbreed army in Ben 10 Alien Force, to complete a teleporting gate large enough to transport the entire warfleet at once, for easy extermination.
 * In an episode of Batman the Brave And The Bold the day is saved by teleporting Earth's moon to another planet (so as to cause a solar eclipse and shut down the enemy's solar-powered war machines) and then back. It's every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.
 * On Generator Rex, it's revealed in the episode named for her that villainess Breach stole the entire town of Greenville, Ohio and stuck it in a pocket dimension. She later returned the people and used the town to store anything (and anyONE) that attracts her interest.
 * The Invader Zim Christmas Episode was based around Zim's plan to teleport the entire human species to the Tallests to be used as slaves. He fails, of course.