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{{quote|''Hi, I'm Dr. Daniel Jackson. Now, you've heard the term "hyperspace" for years in sci-fi movies and television shows, but what does it really mean?''|'''Instructional video shown to new members of the ''[[Stargate]]'' program.'''}}
'''Subspace'''
Before there was ''Star Trek'', Golden Age science fiction would sometimes include references to "sub-etheric" communications or waves. The idea of the ether had already been disproved, but the term was useful for "waves that behave kinda like light, only different."
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[[I Thought It Meant|Not to be confused]] with the other [[wikipedia:Subspace (BDSM)|subspace]]. [[Running Gag|Or with the]] other other [[wikipedia:Subspace topology|subspace]].
'''Hyperspace'''
If both terms are used in a story, then typically subspace will only allow data transmissions, but will carry them almost instantaneously. Hyperspace will be slower, but will at least temporarily allow matter (spaceships) to travel through it.
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* In the [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]], Subspace is sometimes used for communications and sensors, but has shorter range and is slower than Hyperwave, making this a subversion, as both Subspace and Hyperspace can be used for Sensors, Communications and Travel, but Hyperspace is unilaterally faster.
* In the ''[[Animorphs]]'' series, "Z-space" is the place where [[Shapeshifter Baggage]] goes, and spaceships travel in it for FTL.
* [[Iain M Banks|Iain M. Banks']] ''[[The Culture|Culture]]'' novels feature two types of Hyperspace: Ultraspace and Infraspace. This is a result of the description of the nature of the Universe in those novels - as the Universe expands, other Universes are expanding "inside" it (in a multi-dimensional analogue of a kind of expanding onion, with the individual layers of the onion representing Universes). Hyperspace is found "in between" the Universes, with Ultraspace defined as the Hyperspace between a Universe and the one "above" it and Infraspace being defined as the one between a Universe and the one "below" it. Interstingly, these spaces appear to have a
* John E. Stith's ''Redshift Rendezvous'' features several levels of Hyperspace in which the universe is progressively smaller and the speed of light decreases with each step. The story is largely concerned with a murder mystery on a spaceship traveling in the level where the speed of light is
* In ''50 Great Short Short Science Fiction Stories'' one of the short stories deal with breaking through to hyperspace only to discover that it is ''slower'' than light speed and thus useless.
* All FTL travel in ''[[The History of the Galaxy]]'' is done through a dimension/anomaly called "hypersphere". Unlike the mathematical term, which simply means a sphere in more than 3 dimensions, this hypersphere is more like your typical sci-fi hyperspace. It exists alongside normal space/time and appears to have a spherical shape (with our galaxy surrounding it). Like any sphere, it has a center, and several later (timeline-wise) novels deal with what's located there and the impact it has on interstellar travel. The properties of hypersphere are stated in most novels, with novels dealing with the nature of hypersphere going into more detail. Of note is the fact that humans are one of the few known races to have developed hyperdrives (although the discovery of hypersphere itself was a complete, and tragic, accident, involving the disappearance of the first extrasolar colony ship). Most other races have learned to use the "horizontal" force-lines in hypersphere (they connect large stellar bodies such as stars or planets) as tunnels of sorts, creating a [[Portal Network]]. While they don't need ships to travel from planet to planet, they are limited to the network, until their ships traveling on sublight can set up a gate in a new system. When humanity first encounters them, the aliens quickly adapt human hyperdrives for their own ships. Hyperdrives are made up of two generators: one to "submerge" a ship into hypersphere and one to "surface" it back to normal space. They are designed to be infallible and almost never break down.
* In [[James H. Schmitz]]'s [[Federation of the Hub]] series, [[One Riot, One Ranger|special agent]] Heslet Quillan's cover is that he's a major in the "Subspace Engineers." These stories don't seem to spell out quite what their notion of subspace '''does''', but given that one [[Space Station]] is shown to have a fairly large subspace section -- there's a reference to starships docked in subspace locks -- it '''may''' be a kind of [[Pocket Dimension]] to increase the station's usable volume.
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== Tabletop Games ==
* The [[Warhammer
** Since you go to the Warp when you die, hyperspace in Warhammer 40k really is flying through ''[[Hell]]''. Humans don't have a strong enough psyche to hold themselves together, so their souls will either just dissolve back into the Warp or "lose sense", intuitively becoming animalistic or
*** That's because they accidentally created an ''Eldar-eating Chaos God(dess?)''. The Warp used to be a safe place for them, but no longer. That's why they use soulstones, is to prevent them from getting into the Warp.
** While the Warp jump remains the primary means of FTL travel for many races, the Webway is a hyperspace utilized almost exclusively by the Eldar. It is made of a series of tunnels somewhere between the Warp and realspace, connecting portals from millions of locations in realspace together. It's limited in that the Webway portals are fixed and new locations must have a portal built at that location to be accessed afterwards, and that since the cataclysmic fall of the Eldar, many parts of the Webway have been destroyed, lost, inhabited by Daemons or other strange creatures and dangerous entities; yet despite all of this, Webway travel is much quicker and safer than relying on Warp jump technology.
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[[Category:Teleportation Tropes]]
[[Category:Faster Than Light Index]]
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