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)

Okay, first things first, some more searching has found that Skaro being in "Hyperspace" is also discussed in the contemporary Information Service and the quite modern Liberation of the Daleks. Liberation doesn't really offer anything new, given that its just a remake of the panel from Genesis and is intentionally retro. Information Service is notable because it references a hyper-space communications scanner which was used to observe the Daleks; to me, that still reads rooted in this hyperspace being deep space. For the record, the contemporary The Road to Conflict uses the term "deep space" for Skaro's location and references the curve of the universe, further indicating that Skaro and Earth are on the same plane. Otherwise, the only other possible source I can think of is the Dalek Survival Guide, which I am currently endeavoring to procure. So far, the further uses of "Hyperspace" related in this sense to Skaro seem to keep the deep space meaning.

There are multiple ways to respond to your message, but the thing I can't avoid is that this seems like a conflict of interest due to having overlap with how you think the wiki should cover your own stories. You reference a "history of Who's riffs on the preexisting sci-fi stock-word", but the only concrete example you give is your own riff. I do not believe that your stories should be treated as more significant than others, and the others have not yet been textually proven to have Genesis of Evil hyperspace in their DNA. Pretty much all the depictions of Hyperspace are riffs on a specific concept (which was itself originally a riff on the mathematics of higher dimensions, which were more commonly called hyperspaces back then), and the concept is a lot more specific than just "mysterious" and "region" (just to clarify, sci-fi writers knew about the vast distances of space in the early 20th cen, and hyperspace even back then was a solution to that, showing the ships avoiding the vastness of space and making trips smaller by travelling in this hyperdimensional region. The Daleks, being more kiddie as you say, owes more to Dan Dare where that wasn't a problem.). I made the page island universe earlier this week in part due to your comment about "universe = galaxy" stuff and I think it more accurately conveys what is meant when Whittaker says "universe" (although, it doesn't yet discuss the retcon of AUDIO: Quinnis ^[+]Loading...["Quinnis (audio story)"], a notable omission), because it wouldn't make sense to only cover that information on universe. A rose by any name is just as sweet, but not so with another plant named 'rose'.

When you say that you find it "harder to gauge intent" than I do, I would respond that intent is ephemeral. I think it can only be judged by textual evidence and records, which are what I've been working off. For example, your beliefs are evident from the text that you have written, and I discern that they influence your desire for the possibility that previous writers have had similar understandings to your own. Firmer evidence of other writers having similar interpretations would be very interesting and fun for wikifying, but short of a quote from Whittaker or whoever wrote these things, I don't think Genesis of Evil should go on the list of appearances on the main Hyperspace page. (BTW, Parkin uses Hyperspace with regards to unnamed copyright-free Daleks in Beige Planet Mars, which depicts the unnamed Daleks as coming from another galaxy in normal space.) (Second aside: the only other analysis of the line "deep in hyperspace" I could find was on this fan website, which states, "I suspect that David Whitaker, whose grasp of science is evidently tenuous at best, is not basing his use of the word on accepted ideas, and uses Hyperspace instead to mean an area of space a long way away from Earth (i.e. deep space)." At the very least, my reading of the text is not alone.)

When it comes to actual wiki decisions, despite all this guff and catting about, I agree that a paragraph in the in-universe bit of Hyperspace would be good. I also believe (and this is where it gets sorta weird, because as you say this isn't really a conversation for you) that your version of Hyperspace, because it goes a distinct name (Hyades-Space), overlaps with several locations for which we have pages (including the Fifth Universe and Hyades Cluster?), is part of a crossover cosmology (Aristide Twain multiverse?), and is apparently apt to be treated as a future licensable DWU concept, should have its own page. This would handily allow for fluid coverage of the various things named "Hyperspace" including this page (I should think that the Hyades-Space could be mentioned in-universe as having parallels with this use of the term Hyperspace), while also having a core page for the most-frequently-used conception of hyperspace. TheChampionOfTime ☎ 17:20, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

(I have to agree with TCOT's strong arguments here, so far. This is not a closing post. I should mention that Scrooge should not be the one to close it, though, for the reasons outlined above.)
×   SOTO contribs ×°/↯/•]   💬•| {/-//:   20:05, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Adding to scattered TV21 examples above, The Daleks actually regularly reminded its readers that the action was taking place in hyper-space. The in-universe banners at the top of each instalment usually noted it was a "report from the Space News Agency via hyper-space video-phone" with another relevant variation being a "report relayed from a Hyper-Space News Agency correspondent". --Borisashton ☎ 21:07, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

@User:Borisashton: thank you for the addition! I actually think, now I've been reminded, that the phone is an important point which, to my mind, somewhat calls the starkness of the "Hyperspace in TV21 is just a region of deep space" reading into question. A "hyper-space video-phone" being a distinct piece of equipment makes a good deal more sense under the assumption that hyper-space is a cosmologically special medium to broadcast info through, distinct from ordinary space, than if you take it to just be the name of a place; a "Fourth Galaxy Video-Phone" would be quite an odd phrase to coin. (With all COI-related disclaimers taken as said given what follows, it may be worth noting that Love & War ^[+]Loading...["Love & War (short story)"] does mention hyperspace videophone technology.)

@User:TheChampionOfTime: I did spot island universe, which is a very good page! But I strongly think its contents should get a {{main}} paragraph at Universe, as a matter of fact, for precisely the reason you mention in its BTS section: insofar as they were believed, in this framework, to have had their own Big Bangs, they're kind of their own accidentally-fictional hybrid concepts between what we now understand by universe, and what we now understand by galaxy.

"You reference a "history of Who's riffs on the preexisting sci-fi stock-word", but the only concrete example you give is your own riff"

No no no. Here, I treated any of the things at Hyperspace as counting as "riffs on the preexisting sci-fi stock word", so that things like Frontier in Space ^[+]Loading...["Frontier in Space (TV story)"] were such "riffs". I didn't mean meta-riffs on early already-DWU sources.

I guess we're kind of coming at this from different philosophies of coverage (as also seen by the "gaugeing intent" thing), and we have different instincts about where the burden of proof should be, in the sense that I think reusing the same word prima facie demonstrates that there's Asimov-DNA in the Whitakerian usage, and if we agree that Whitaker got it from Asimov & al., I think that makes it far more than "another plant called rose", but very much a variant account of a preexisting fictional concept ("a thing called Hyperspace that spaceships traverse"), albeit one that radically redefines what that thing materially is. The Altered Vistas quote doesn't seem at odds with my view: in saying Whitaker had a "tenuous grasp on" the science involved they do seem to be taking it for granted that Whitaker is (mis)using the preexisting coinage of "hyperspace", not happening to have made up of whole cloth a word for deep space which Asimov and others had unrelatedly used for something else. And that much is all I need to make my case.

It's like… Imagine if for some reason we were a Wiki that covered both Dr. Who and the Daleks ^[+]Loading...["Dr. Who and the Daleks (theatrical film)"] and the TVM, but not An Unearthly Child ^[+]Loading...["An Unearthly Child (TV story)"]; we would then have to decide if we cover Cushing's Dr Who and McCoy/McCoy's Doctor(s) as versions of the same character. I say we should, unless we had evidence that Segal & Co. somehow named their Time Lord "the Doctor" and made his time machine a police box by mistake. Cushing's Dr Who and McGann's Doctor might have very little to connect them in that hypothetical Wiki's body of valid sources; one is an apparently-human inventor called Dr Who, the other a hybrid Time Lord with thirteen lives who "calls himself the Doctor". But with the ur-text in hand we can quite see that Segal and Whitaker were writing divergent takes on the same underlying thing, and so if it had a page on The Doctor that Wiki would be wrong to say that he debuted n the TVM rather than Dr Who and the Daleks. I believe that Hyperspace (Whitaker) and Hyperspace (FiS) onwards are the same deal except that we happen to not cover the shared ur-text.

(If anything in your post begins to sway me, then, it is the fact that "hyperspace" was apparently widespread in mathematics at the time. This raises the possibility that Whitaker got it directly from this math usage, not from contemporary science fiction, and so it really is a coincidence that the same term would come to be used in Frontier in Space et al. for another fictional thing. But I still think the shared genre makes it more likely that Whitaker reaching for the name was an evolution of the Asimovian usage, and that the burden of proof would be on ruling it out.)

I guess perhaps one solution would be to have Hyperspace as one of yer in-universe-disambig-pages, Hyperspace (deep space), and Hyperspace (dimension)? (Give or take a specific third page for "my" portrayal if you think that's appropriate.) That would, I suppose, be more analogous to The Doctor/Dr. Who (Dr. Who and the Daleks)/Eighth Doctor.

"For example, your beliefs are evident from the text that you have written, and I discern that they influence your desire for the possibility that previous writers have had similar understandings to your own. Firmer evidence of other writers having similar interpretations…"

Again, and in a subtly different way, we have different instincts as to where the burden of proof is. For my money "these are the same made-up word applied to vaguely similar things; and at least one writer has conflated them" is enough to say that you can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that no other DWU writer has had the conflation in the back of their mind. And even without trying to mind-read past authors, my general belief is that the Wiki's coverage should, within reason, aim to be as open as possible to a plurality of possible interpretations of our body of valid sources and the connections that might arise between any two of them, rather than hew as close as possible to our-best-guess-as-to-the-authorial-intent. Far from trying to force one interpretation, I have a kind of (though not maximally) death-of-the-authory view of this. I certainly don't want what I happen to have written myself to be anything more than "one account"!

But I feel like putting Frontier as "first_cs" at Hyperspace, and insisting that it really is just a coincidence, namesakes, nothing-to-see-here, to me, would seem to actively rule out a perfectly sensible reading — a reading which I would have insisted was perfectly sensible long before I wrote the couple of DWU stories where I ran with that theory. (Which it would be unwise to take as my singular "beliefs"; I am perfectly apt to contradict or retcon myself in another story someday; Wikification has not gotten to it yet but Book of the Snowstorm itself pointedly and deliberately introduces an inconsistency for which I have no clever explanation and which really is just me taking different decisions as to how to account for a particular element in the DWU while writing two different things.) It's a reading which occurred to me based on that juxtaposition, therefore it's a reading which could occur to other people, whether or not it already has and whether or not those people were DWU writers. We are, in an admittedly small way, underserving the text if we obscure that potentially-fertile juxtaposition.

This really is how I have thought of this since before I wrote the DWU stories at issue, as the edit history shows. That's why I do think it's proper for me to take an active part in this discussion (though I strongly agree with User:SOTO that I should not be closing it insofar as a talk-page discussion needs a closing post; I'm not wearing my admin hat here, just acting as a concerned editor), so long as I take pains, as I have done, to separate what my works bring to the table from the way I think other texts should be covered. Speaking of which:

"(and this is where it gets sorta weird, because as you say this isn't really a conversation for you)"

Yeah. Hard break between the above, which is me talking as a Wiki-editor, and the following, which is me clarifying a few points with my writer and prose-editors hat on, as an author might weigh in on Wiki affairs on social media/a blog/etc. We can go through the rigamarole of me making this a citable blog post if necessary, but as I'm only trying to convey information to User:TheChampionOfTime rather than write anything that could be actively cited in a BTS section I don't see the need to switch platforms for appearances' sake. (I will if people want me to.) Now then:

"(…) your version of Hyperspace, because it goes a distinct name (Hyades-Space), overlaps with several locations for which we have pages (including the Fifth Universe and Hyades Cluster?), is part of a crossover cosmology (Aristide Twain multiverse?), and is apparently apt to be treated as a future licensable DWU concept, should have its own page."

Well, an interesting wrinkle here is that it was actually Ryan Fogarty who coined "Hyades-Space" in Revelry of the Redacted ^[+]Loading...["Revelry of the Redacted (short story)"]. For which I was the credited editor, mind you, so there's still a COI there; I mention it more tho show that as far as covering that concept for its own sake would go, it's not really a personal vision that sprang fully-formed from my sole head, nor a singular copyright; all of this is modular. "Hyades-Space" is really the only coinage in all of this that I would call "copyrightable", everything else being nothing more than particular spins on public-domain terminology — and it's not mine!

Similarly the phrase "Aristide Twain multiverse" really wouldn't be accurate for several reasons. It's not "my" "multiverse". First because it's how I use the public-domain concept of "the Multiverse" in my stories, and I use the term synonymously with Omniverse; it's not a "multiverse" the way Marvel Multiverse is, and as an in-universe 'thing' it has no more or less defining features than "the set containing all universes". And secondly because it isn't uniquely "mine", either in creation or usage; it's certainly always been synonymous with "Lupan Evezan's Multiverse", and even "the The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids Multiverse" would miss the mark as it has has long become functionally indistinguishable from the Jenny Everywhere mythos portrayal of the Multiverse.

(In case there's any confusion on this point, it being "the Fifth Universe" in the Council of Frogs classification has no underlying cosmological significance — it does not imply that it or indeed the Third Universe have any kind of shared meta-origin or essence that other fictional universes might lack. The CoF classification has always emphatically been a post hoc numbering system for the use of interdimensional travellers, and its numbers have no diegetic meaning beyond what order they were registered by the Frogs in.)

As I said, this is me setting the record straight as a writer; I have no idea how you might want to square this circle on-Wiki, being that I quite see how with a Wiki editor's preoccupation you might want to create some sort of hub page on this stuff.

Unrelatedly and more pointedly, Hyades-Space isn't intended as synonymous with the Hyades Cluster per se. The thing, there, is that Ryan had decided to riff on The King in Yellow, with the Hyperspace Tyrants being equated with the civilisation which built Carcosa. Chambers makes multiple references to "the mystery of the Hyades" in the book, and The Repairer of Reputation in particular mentions "the lakes which connected Hastur, Aldebaran and the mystery of the Hyades". The interpretation hinted at by the phrase "Hyades-Space" is that Hyperspace/the Fifth Universe is that same alterdimensional space which can be accessed through a particular portal taking the form of a lake in the Hyades. (And, presumably, also through similar lakes in the Hastur and Aldebaran systems.)

Of course, if you'll permit me to end with a wink, my own principles with regards to possible interpretations mean that editor-Scrooge will fight tooth and nail for your right to write Hyades-Space in a way which allows its equation with the Hyades Cluster to arise in a reader's mind as a possibility. Even though writer-Scrooge thinks that's quite wrong. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 22:01, 14 December 2024 (UTC)