Talk:Hyperspace (deep space)

Merge

A map showing the border of Hyper-Space and Sector 25. Note that the ship's trajectory continues into the region of space beyond, indicating that Hyper-Space is this region of vast uncharted space.

When I look at the main Hyperspace page as it is right now, its clear that every single story there is talking about the same thing: another plane associated with fast travel over long distances. Hyperspace in the sources on this page, meanwhile, has none of those associations.

PROSE: Doctor Who and the Daleks ^[+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Daleks (short story)"], COMIC: The Batmen ^[+]Loading...["The Batmen (comic story)"], and PROSE: Stingray Attacked! ^[+]Loading...["Stingray Attacked! (short story)"] demonstrably use the term synonymously with distant space. This Hyperspace is a place in spatial continuity with planet Earth and is a region travelled through which does not impact space travel speed, and therefore is not like what we call "Hyperspace". (Looking into the Fireball XL5 side of things, I'm unsure if the term "Hyperspace" is used at any point in the television series, but I did find that the episode Prisoner on the Lost Planet also shows Fireball XL5 journeying to the region of deep space beyond Sector 25, which it calls "uncharted space".)

The contentious line is thus the famous "Deep in Hyperspace is the Planet Skaro. This world is the most feared globe in all the Universe." I believe that we should Occam's Razor this to mean the deep space sense of Hyperspace by the fact that: 1. this text is accompanied by an illustration of Skaro in regular 'ol space, 2. the use of the word "deep" once more implies a spatial continuity with other parts of the universe, 3. Genesis of Evil ^[+]Loading...["Genesis of Evil (comic story)"] was published in TV Century 21 at the same time as The Batmen by the same creative team and is set in the same universe, and 4. most of the details of Genesis are taken from The Dalek Book and in The Dalek Book Skaro is said to be from the "dark unexplored regions of outer space".

Even if a later source with the Daleks has referenced them as living in an Asimovian Hyperspace (which I don't think has yet happened), I believe that we should record the original stories as meaning Hyperspace in this sense. TheChampionOfTime ☎ 17:06, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Hmm. Laid out like this, this is a persuasive argument, but I still think a complete separation treating the two Hyperspaces as no more than unrelated namesakes is hazardous. I feel the same way about the "universe"="galaxy" thing; yes, from a certain point of view, this is just a different meaning of the word "universe", but is it altogether? We are dealing with writers whose understanding of the science and cosmology itself was unlike ours.

If you look at 60s sources which speak about "other universes" beyond a physical void you can cross, yes, you can think "they're just using a different word for what we'd call galaxy", but you might equally say: huh, I see where Wild Blue Yonder ^[+]Loading...["Wild Blue Yonder (TV story)"] gets it from. Were they mistakenly calling galaxies universes, or were they misconstruing what we now know to be mere distant clusters of stars as physically-reachable "alternate universes"? I think the answer to that has to be "a bit of both". When someone says the Daleks are from "a distant universe" this does, to my mind, often carry an intent of marking them out as more remote, more eldritch, more — in a literal sense — otherworldly than merely "from some stars very far far from ours". We would not be covering "next universe but one" correctly if we treated it as precisely the same thing as Skaro's galaxy.

And I feel a similar and indeed stronger way about "Hyperspace". I don't think the Dalek Books are such hard science that "a different form of space, with different physical laws" and "a region of space whose relation to the Milky Way can be mapped out two-dimensionally" are incompatible. In fact, looking at the "History" section of Hyperspace on Wikipedia, we find that one of the earliest detailed descriptions of it, in the original Foundation (1951), is as:

…an unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing…Isaac Asimov

I look at that, and I can only conclude that this and other first-half-the-20th-century usages of "Hyperspace" in what we construe as the more familiar other-plane sense are what the Dalek writers were attempting to riff on. Mark the use of "region" in the Asimov quote. Asimov & al. had Hyperspace as a "mysterious region" that interstellar spaceships pass through; and my view is that 60s Dalek material's "Hyperspace" as a mysterious region of space with "little-known depths" must surely be very much an evolution of that early classic-sci-fi usage, just… by people who hadn't quite grokked the higher-dimensional-physics aspect. Or deliberately decided to dumb it down for the kiddos, I don't know. (I'll never finish writing this if I check my archives for every source which uses the word, but Warmonger ^[+]Loading...["Warmonger (novel)"] has an interesting instance of Terrance Dicks's Doctor talking about "the mysterious realm of hyperspace" as late as 2002, even in a story which is broadly using hyperspace in its typical meaning as a plot device to get FTL spaceships.)

Hence, this still looks to me like a divergent portrayal of the same underlying imaginary concept. Divergent enough to get its own page? Maybe. Why not. But I strongly feel it should be documented at Hyperspace with "accounts" language as part of the history of Who's riffs on the preexisting sci-fi stock-word. A tiny {{you may}} doesn't cut it.

Oh, and this is really a secondary point, but:

Even if a later source with the Daleks has referenced them as living in an Asimovian Hyperspace (which I don't think has yet happened), I believe that we should record the original stories as meaning Hyperspace in this sense.

Ah… Well here is where things get a bit awkward for me, for both T:WIKIFY OWN and T:SPOIL reasons. Suffice it to say that the whole thing with the Hyperspace Tyrants in The Book of the Snowstorm is very much consciously riffing on the Dalekmania usage of "Hyperspace" (which, if nothing else, you can ferret out textually from the synonym "Fifth Universe" introduced therein being a roundabout conflation with the "next universe but one": next but one to the Third Universe, ergo Fifth, geddit). Now, the important wrinkle here is that the Hyperspace Tyrants are not the Daleks, even in a T:HOMEWORLD sense, and you can quote me on this. (I mean, you can't, because can't cite authorial quotations made on the Wiki itself, but yaknowhatimean.) They're clearly not pepperpots; they behave differently; they have Dark Lords and Knights and Viziers. But they do conspicuously… let's say, fit in the same hole in the DWU's history that is filled by the Daleks in most accounts. They invaded the Earth in 2150, for example.

So… obviously, it's not for me to handle coverage of these guys. And frankly I don't know how you people are supposed to manage it until a certain other story comes out to explain the timey-wimey subtleties of what's going on with the HTs. But if you broaden the question from whether any source with the Daleks has understood itself to conflate 60s-Hyperspace with Asimovian-Hyperspace, to whether any valid source at all has done so, there you are. Make of it what you will.

But I don't feel this question is decisive. First, I think the original textual history points at the actual 60s usage having been admittedly-aberrant portrayals of "conventional" hyperspace, not an unrelated thing with the same name; and second, I think it's harder to gauge intent than you seem to. How many DWU writers have both read Genesis of Evil and gone on to mention "Hyperspace" as a part of their worldbuilding? How can you know for sure whether they understand Genesis to be part of that concept's DWU background when they add their own brick to the pile? In AHistory Lance Parkin quotes the Genesis of Evil introductory caption verbatim without commentary, and at other points talks about Dalek fleets moving in and of Hyperspace in the "conventional" sense, without feeling the need to disambiguate; AHistory is not itself a valid source, of course, but does that not tell us something about Parkin's background assumptions when he goes on to use "hyperspace" in his DWU fiction (as he does in e.g. The Infinity Doctors? --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 18:18, 10 December 2024 (UTC)