When I was a student of physics I remember having to answer a question about what faster-than-light travel would look like, from the windows of a spaceship. I think it was in Mathematical Methods and Classical Field Theory[1], though it may have been Relativistic Field Theory[7], and I vaguely recall the answer involved stars from behind the spaceship (that you couldn’t see from the windscreen) slowly moving into the front view; as the ship got further from the lightspeed limit, more of these stars would come into the front and if you got fast enough you would eventually see all the stars visible to the eye in a kind of field in front of you, surrounded by darkness (or something). This, of course, would be when the gibbering madness set in, and one of your crew decided to torch the ship in honour of an unnamed god[9]. Note that this is very different to the Star Wars image, where all the stars blur. In fact, I think our solutions explicitly stated that at faster than the speed of light, stars can’t blur (I can’t remember why).
It’s a mark of how far we had come by the time we got to MM&CFT (3rd year, I seem to recall) to compare that question and its solution to the question we got in first year Newtonian Mechanics: do you get less wet if you run through rain?
Currently I’m reading China Mieville’s Embassytown, and he’s writing about hyperspace quite a bit – he calls it the immer – which got me to thinking about different visions of hyperspace and how it can be represented in science fiction. It’s a topic of enduring interest to sci-fi authors, and there’s a lot of different ways of representing it. I can only remember four now, but here goes:
- Mieville’s strange ocean: The immer is a kind of ocean of darkness and chaos, with its own predators that may or may not be life-forms, and strange beings that sometimes hitch into the realm of the living. There are tides, currents, and deeps, and it is navigated by humans who learn to work their way through these precarious shoals. It also makes humans sick to be in it, and it is conceived as running through or between the material of the universe. The universe we are in is the third universe, with two previous ones having grown and then collapsed; but the immer was there through all of them. This immer is dark and dangerous, rich in its own life and history.
- Iain M. Banks’s strange geometry: in contrast, Banks’s Culture novels have a representation of hyperspace as a barren, mathematical substrate underlying physical reality; ships travel at hyperspeed through this substrate, and as far as I can remember there are no dangers or risks to them, except when they emerge too close to a gravitational source, which warps the substrate and increases the risk that the ship will be torn apart by entering or leaving the substrate. While Mieville’s hyperspace speaks of a mysterious and wild universe that humans explore at their peril, Banks’s vision speaks of a universe subjugated to human will, reduced to a toll-road with a few tricky interchanges. These different visions are very suited to the cultural backdrops of the novel, I think – an interesting pairing of the cosmological and the sociological.
- Stephen Baxter’s Bubble: In Ark (the sequel to Flood) we get a description of an early attempt at inerstellar FTL flight. This time it’s a fragile bubble surrounding a spaceship, held together with huge amounts of energy, which draws the ship forward into a kind of gap in the space-time continuum. Anything touching the bubble from the inside is instantly torn apart, and once the bubble is set on its path it can’t be diverted or its direction changed. It’s very “realistic” sci-fi (he even gives a reference) and the whole story, both inside the Ark and in the science guiding its use, is based primarily around the constraints the science poses on action. The opposite of the Culture in every way.
- Gateway Catapults: The staple of shows like Babylon 5, these present us with hyperspace as a kind of insoluble problem. Instead of navigating it, you get chucked through it by a massive catapult. Some ships (usually military) can open their own gateways into the swirling mystery of hyperspace, but others just hurl themselves at the gate and hope for the best. This is a vision of high science fiction where one of the fundamental mechanisms of the social order is actually quite primitive. We also see this in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, where the decision to close the gates destroys whole societies – and is driven by the realization that the human “masters” of the gates never understood them or their real purpose at all.
Hyperspace in its many forms seems like it plays a more important role in the universes of its setting than mere substance. It’s not just a scientific backdrop or a constraint on action; it takes a form which often reinforces or complements the style and cultural background of the novel. It’s a very good example of how the best sci-fi is not about the science at all, but about what it can be used to tell us about ourselves.
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fn1:literally the most evil subject you can take. This subject ate Electromagnetism and Advanced Quantum Mechanics[2] for breakfast and shat them out as a tensor problem you couldn’t solve by graduation, then laughed at your poor mortal brain and ate your soul for lunch. It was an evil subject, worth a paltry 2 credit points (out of 24 in my year), but which consisted of 6 assignments and an exam, and each assignment took – this is not an exaggeration – at least 50 pages of scrap paper, and at least 12 hours of our time. My friends and I had a shift system going in Lab (which, by comparison, was 9 hours a week and worth 8 credit points). One of us would work on the experiment while the other three used up copious amounts of paper trying to solve impossible problems in gravitational dipoles[3]. Then after lab we would charge off to our tutor’s room and he would infuriatingly refuse to give us the answers[4], even though it meant we would pester him again. Finally we would get a breakthrough, and off we would go to reduce the romantic image of moonlight and the gentle slap of waves on the beach to a series of Bessel Functions[5].
fn2: for which I got 94%, yay![6]
fn3: seriously, who knew the tides were soooo fucking complex?
fn4: what can I say, we weren’t really paying fees at this university, we got in on merit and we survived by luck, effort and the regular application of sleepless nights and cask wine to every problem. No one thought we had any right to pass anything, and everybody forced us to study.
fn5: Which, also, can I say, you guys suck.
fn6: Which reminds me that the pure maths subject Lie Algebras – which apparently, people who understand it tell me, has some relationship to Advanced Quantum Mechanics – may have been harder than CFT&MM; but that subject was taught by a Mind Flayer, so I’m not sure if my memory of it is correct
fn7: I’m pretty sure we had a subject called this. It had a lot of Tensor equations in it, and when me and my buddies arrived in our Honours Year[8] there was an equation pinned to the door of our room (from the previous poor bastard to study there) which consisted entirely of Tensor expressions, and took up a whole page of A4 paper (in a not-very-large font). We all stood looking at it, and said “fuck. What have we done?”
fn8: Honours is an Australian idea, I think: because Australians are smarter than you lot, we do our undergraduate degree in three years, then our masters degree (and thesis) is compressed into one year with two extra subjects and called “honours” even though there’s nothing honourable about brutalizing young people in this way. In addition to having the kind of discipline and brains and educational background required to survive this kind of nasty, Australia also has one of the best rugby teams in the world. Dwell on that, Northern Hemisphere Losers!
fn9: This part wasn’t in the official solutions, but I should think it’s pretty obvious.
Compromise and Conceit 
August 26, 2011 at 3:30 am
It was because of things like this that I avoided the Halls of Higher Learning.
Let us stop wanking on about hyperspace. When we travel to the stars it’s going to be at the dull but very hard to achieve speed of 10% of C. What do the stars look like at that speed?
August 26, 2011 at 8:47 am
Babylon 5’s jump gates actually opened a portal to a parallel hyperspace, sort of like a tamer version of the one you describe for China Mieville. Though the Babylon 5 one was more infinite featureless plane that you could get lost on.
The catapults you describe are better represented by Mass Effect’s mass relays, where long jumps across stars require using ancient technology that isn’t properly understood to throw yourself to the far side of the galaxy. The Shiva Option by David Webber uses a similar “gravitational anomaly” as the trigger for point to point travel across stars. If I recall correctly, the Shiva option does contain some reference to how the relativistic travel irritates physicists as it doesn’t (despite logic) result in time travel.
You’re also overlooking Star Trek where the equivalent FTL is just a warping of normal space, which means that you don’t really pick up the same “other dimension” vibe you can get from other models.
An additional version I recall is Banner of the Stars, where hyperspace is a two dimensional parallel universe that ships jump into. The ships engines provide a three dimensional space around them that can intersect with other ships. My mental model of it was like crawling around under a bed spread – it’s normally flat but where you crawl is pushed up to make way for you. In the episodes I saw it didn’t feature much as a mechanism of travel…
A more noteworthy comment is that the nature of hyperspace plays a heavy role in determining how combat and social structures are displayed in the story. For example, point to point transfers lead to stories where blocking actions are possible at the edges of systems, so words and concepts like sieges become common. Alternatively FTL travel that lets you pop out anywhere (especially when it can’t be detected) leads to planets and strategic value targets being protected and the rest of the system being ignored.
Similarly, social structures are driven by the speed of travel and communication. I recall hearing that Traveller command structures were based on English navy traditions because of the idea that the captain couldn’t contact his commanders back home to ask for orders and the same idea is pretty common in other books where travel is faster than communications.
Though the point about communications does raise the question of why the captain of the Enterprise has any authority at all. Given Earth can call him any time I’d expect it to be more like the modern military where if something really unusual comes up (i.e. contact with a new life form!) the standard orders would be “pull back and call a specialist”.
August 26, 2011 at 10:37 am
Scott: at 10% of light speed I imagine the stars look very boring. Also, we’ll never go anywhere! This question was relevant for my physics course, actually, because answering it involved drawing some special diagrams that described the space-time structure (I don’t remember what these are called now – Minkowski graphs?) It was a kind of challenge of our ability to think through simple problems using the basic theoretical concepts, rather than just plunging into the maths. This is why I abandoned physics: as if I wasn’t bad enough at the maths, I was absolutely terrible at the underlying theoretical concepts. That pretty much disqualifies you from getting anywhere worthwhile in the field. And this stuff isn’t just random wank – many of the ideas of special and general relativity are crucial to our ability to perform research in high energy physics, astronautic engineering, and astronomy. Sadly, I’m too stupid to get them.
Paul: thanks for the Babylon 5 correction. I remember when I played Traveller that they made a big point about the inability to send messages faster than a spaceship. The whole structure of the Imperium was based on the glacial pace of interstellar communication, and they described this as very important to their vision of the galaxy. I recall a basic jump engine would take you 1 parsec (about 3 light years, right?) in one week, so travelling anywhere took a while. It was an important part of the tramp trader/speculation element of the game too, I think – interplanetary trade was slower, less reliable, and more old-fashioned than international trade is now.
I remember the entire premise of Banks’s Consider Phlebas depends on a conceit of hyperspace – the Culture Ship was trapped in a planetary orbit by the Iridans, but they weren’t expecting it to fight an awesomely vicious rearguard action and then hyperspatially displace its mind inside the planet, because doing so is so dangerous. So then everyone had to go planetside to find the Mind, rather than the Iridans just wrenching it out of the wrecked ship.
So yeah, the imagined physics of the fabric of space-time can be a lot more important for the novel than just “it gets me from A to B.”