History HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace / Literature

* ''Literature/{{Exordia}}: Wrongspace drives offer near-instantaneous interstellar travel. They do this by spoofing the [[SpiritWorld aretaic]] machinery that transfers souls to the seven afterlives so it swallows up your entire ship, sending it on a one-way trip to Death Itself. To avoid actually dying, you need to alter your momentum to slingshot yourself around Death without falling into it. And since the only thing the machinery of Death recognizes is souls, you gain that momentum by ejecting the soul of someone onboard, killing them. Do it right (minor course corrections accomplished by shooting off bits of your own soul) and you'll end up wherever you want in time and space, since the afterlife naturally connects to all of them. Do it wrong and you might catapult yourself into Hell. Not even Ssrin, a callous (former) operative of Exordia with countless atrocities under her belt, is comfortable using a wrongspace drive.

** Portal Stones are relics from an even earlier age than the TimeOfMyths. They can be used to take someone to alternate timelines where they might experience [[ForWantOfANail their lives if they made different choices]], or to alternate timelines where reality itself works differently (including where time passes differently), or straight from one Portal Stone in your world to another. If you want to go a long distance quickly and don't know exactly how to go straight to the other Portal Stone you want, then the second method might be better than nothing, but accidentally experiencing other lives is traumatizing.

** In ''Literature/TheStarsAreColdToys'' humans have invented the jump drive, which instantaneously transports a spacecraft 12+ light years in a given direction (the distance is always the same). The jump itself gives any human on the ship euphoria like nothing he or she has ever experiences (the main character compared it to death). At the same time, any alien either dies or goes completely insane during such jump (the aliens have their own, slower, means of FTL). However, two alien races are able to survive the jump with their sanity intact: the Counters (biological computers) and the Kualkua (symbiotic shapeshifters). The former manage this by [[spoiler:putting themselves into a coma by mentally dividing by zero and causing an overflow error]], and the latter by [[spoiler:temporarily pulling the Kualkua collective consciousness out of that particular Kualkua]]. The sequel, ''Star Shadow'', reveals that jump drive is [[spoiler:[[ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve a product of human belief, not actual science. That is why it only works for humans]]]]. There also exists a network of planets connected by Shadow Gates, with the side effect of the Gates reading you and putting you wherever they deem fit. Geometers have managed to combine both types of FTL travel into one: they take the ship into slow FTL hyperspace and then start jumping using the same method as humans. Apparently, this neither produces euphoria in humans nor is fatal to aliens and allows a ship to cross vast interstellar distances in a matter of hours. The protagonist realizes that, as soon as the Conclave finds out about this, Earth is screwed. [[spoiler:He doesn't know yet that the system won't work without a human.]]

** It probably doesn't help that the most widespread religion in both human polities that we've seen in any detail holds that anyone who dies in jumpspace is BarredFromTheAfterlife if their body is not returned to realspace for a proper funeral. When [[HumanPopsicle Captain Geary]] hears that the bodies of SpaceNavy officers executed for treason are disposed of in this fashion he's more than a little shocked, because in his time the very idea was considered blasphemous. Although in the current time, it is considered only mortals expression of the severity of the traitors crimes; the blasphemy would be to assume the Living Stars can't find the criminal anywhere.

** Currently, both the Alliance and the Syndics have a PortalNetwork of hypernet gates that work on the principle of [[QuantumMechanicsCanDoAnything quantum entanglement]]. While within a hyperspace bubble, a ship is, effectively, a non-entity in space, which many people don't like to think about, or the fact that there is literally ''nothing'' outside the bubble. There's also the fact that [[spoiler:it's possible to sabotage a hypernet gate in such a way as to cause it to blow up in a [[EarthShatteringKaboom nova-like]] explosion, destroying most things in the system. Luckily, Geary's people figure it out just in time and manage to come up with "patches" to make sure that the sabotages gates blow up in a much smaller explosion]].

* Creator/LarryNiven's ''Literature/KnownSpace'':
** ''Blind Spot''. Since hyperspace is non-Euclidian, a human observer's blind spot "enlarges" to blank out views of this non-space outside the ship. This normally means that view ports seem to disappear into the bulkheads, no big deal -- although, in one tale, Beowulf Shaeffer makes the mistake of looking out past his ship's disintegrated hull into it and forgets how to see, even ''forgets he has eyes'', until he can force his gaze back to his control panel. The blind spot has the unfortunate habit of getting bigger as time goes on in the minds of a sizable chunk of humanity. This eventually drives humans crazy; no commercial starship has windows in the bulkheads for fear that 40% of their passengers will be reduced to permanent, incurable insanity.

** In later ''Literature/{{Ringworld}}'' books, ''things'' living in hyperspace were also mentioned. [[spoiler:The reason that the things in hyperspace are visible is that it turns out that hyperspace is comprehensible near a large mass. It also appears that what's previously been destroying ships in hyperspace near massive objects is the things in hyperspace, which are ''eating them'. This makes Beowulf Shaeffer's wacky theory in "Literature/TheBorderlandOfSol" actually correct, as well as making it possible to save the Ringworld from Earth.]]

* In ''LightNovel/OthersidePicnic'' interstitial space is a space between the normal world and the Otherside that, depending on the entrance used, the user will have to pass through for some time before arriving at their destination, and it can be a pretty unpleasant place. The abnormal floors in the elevator Sorawo and Toriko used to cross over are an example. Another time, the two ended up being sent there while dealing with the Ninja Cats.

* ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'': In the novel "[[Literature/DeathStar Death Star]]" hyperspace is shown to be disorienting to those unfamiliar with FTL travel.

* ''Literature/TheLostFleet'': Anytime the eponymous fleet enters jump space, the characters always get uneasy feelings and are only too relieved to get out. Jump space is considered so awful that to be thrown out into it is a fate only consigned to those convicted of treason. It doesn't help that there appear to be strange lights in jump space that no one has been able to explain or study, due to the way jumps work (i.e. no maneuvering in jump space). It's later stated that the longer one spends in jumpspace, the more unnerving it gets, to the point where two weeks in jumpspace is the maximum anyone has ever spent there and lived to tell the tale. In one of the later books, [[spoiler:the Dancers]] recover the body of an ancient human explorer, one of the first people to attempt to navigate jumpspace, who spent years, if not centuries, in jumpspace before happening on a jump point and exiting in [[spoiler:Dancer]] territory. People assume he must have died mere weeks into the ordeal and shudder at the thought. By the same token, [[spoiler:the Dancers]] appear to be able to make extremely long jumps thought to be impossible and appear to be able to handle being in jumpspace for so long, but they do warn Alliance ships ''not'' to attempt the same jump, presumably, being aware that they can't handle it.

** It probably doesn't help that the most widespread religion in both human polities that we've seen in any detail holds that anyone who dies in jumpspace is BarredFromTheAfterlife if their body is not returned to realspace for a proper funeral. When [[HumanPopsicle Captain Geary]] hears that the bodies of SpaceNavy officers executed for treason are disposed of in this fashion he's more than a little shocked, because in his time the very idea was considered blasphemous.

* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy''

* ''Literature/TheLockedTomb'': The [[TheEmpire Nine Houses']] faster-than-light travel takes a brief shortcut through TheUnderworld. "Brief" because the River's ambient spirit magic will quickly snuff out any living creature who enters, it's full of hungry ghosts that can tear apart even the nigh-immortal Lyctors, and it inflicts awful hallucinations on everyone inside.

* Creator/JamesBlish's "Literature/CommonTime": A person travelling in "over-drive" experiences first experiences his mind (and therefore his perception of time) operating thousands of times faster than his body, and later his body operating vastly faster than his mind -- both potentially fatal conditions. (Several earlier expeditions failed to return). It then gets [[MindScrew weirder]], and the whole thing is possibly kinky.

** In ''[[Recap/PastDoctorAdventuresLovingTheAlien Loving the Alien]]'', a primitive time machine retains, from the Time Vortex, a layer of telepathic Vasser Dust, which imparts to Dr Drakefell an impression of both endless nothingness and infinite potential. Drakefell is left traumatised with fear.

* Creator/RandallGarrett's [[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32347/32347-h/32347-h.htm "Time Fuze"]] has the first team to use the hyperdrive jump to Alpha Centauri only to find the star blowing up. When they try to get back to Earth, it turns out [[spoiler:the drive makes suns blow up when it departs as well as when it arrives]].

* In another of Drake's books, ''Starliner'', ships travel through what's officially called "sponge space". Like RCN's Matrix, sponge space took a toll on the mind -- it seems mostly a case of sensory deprivation -- at least of those maintaining the drive systems out on the ship's hull. Informally, it's referred to as "the Cold," and Cold Crews get a bit ''[[AxeCrazy warped]]'' from spending so much time out there. They're also hard to discipline: what can their officers do to punish them that's worse than their normal working environment?

* The titular tramp freighter in John Maddox Robert's ''Space Angel'' uses a jump drive, and crew prepare for that transition with medication, barf bags, diapers, and still have to do some clean up when it's over. A veteran on the crew comments on what it was like to take ten thousand troops through, in zero gravity, with nothing but netting separating them.

* Creator/ABertramChandler's ''Rim Worlds'' novels involve the Mannschenn Drive, which uses 'temporal precession' -- essentially a hybrid of time machine and matter 'phasing', carrying all the worrying baggage of both those technologies. A serious accident will disintegrate the ship: lesser malfunctions can drop the ship into AnotherDimension, or a random time period. (Really random: say, six billion years ahead of schedule.)

* In Vadim Panov's ''Hermeticon'' series interplanetary travel is done via zeppels -- space dirigibles equipped with devices called "astrings", made from metal astrelium and powered by Philosopher's Crystals. When used in transit points, randomly scattered across planet's surface, they can be used to see and then rip a hole through the Void to travel to another planet. The Void is not a pretty place -- not only does it feature the not-quite-space vacuum, it is also populated by Lesser and Greater Signs of the Void -- nasty phenomena of unknown nature. Greater Signs manifest like physical hazards -- storms or something like enormous animals, that can physically damage a zeppel, but also can be seen through a "long eye" (looking device in astring) and avoided. Lesser Signs manifest as individual hallucinations and rarely physical phenomena, like spontaneous combustion. People called "yamauda" are immune to Lesser Signs and thus are naturally first picks during the recruitment, but they cannot see through the long eye. Navigation is very difficult, but almost every colonised planet has a Shkurovich Sphere -- a huge stationary device, also made of astrelium and powered by the Crystal, that shines like a beacon through the Void, although particularly skilled astrologers (navigators) can target the more or less specific destination on the planet itself. Last, but not least: the jump time is random, but noone heard of a jump exceeding 38 minutes, and about 1% of zeppels never makes it to the destination.

* In Creator/LEModesittJr's ''Gravity Dreams'', hyperspace not only requires a TrainingFromHell to be able to navigate through, it also has [[spoiler:a god who wants some reassurance that he is a god.]]
* Vladislav Krapivin's ''Great Crystal'' series has a few people able to move between the worlds [[Literature/TheChroniclesOfAmber Amber]]-style. A few of them learn the trick [[GiverOfLameNames they call]] "direct transition". The traveler's personal space tears off the rest of continuum and soon pops up elsewhere -- at a random place in random world, if he's out of ideas. It's mostly safe, but most avoid doing this, simply because before it comes the ability to percieve and understand that at an arm's length in any direction there's ''nothingness'' as complete as it gets -- not even airless space. Those painting it with mental representations of possible entry points still feel the same. The boy who first in the books did it [[BringMyBrownPants needed new pants]] after one of first jumps and another one passed out hard when moved forcibly by the first... upon losing cat-and-mouse they played with SecretPolice in his CrapsaccharineWorld just for giggles -- they weren't easily scared.

* Inverted in ''The Engines of Dawn''. Hyperspace is so beautiful that a religion sprung up around it, believing it to be not just heaven, but the literal Body of God. In reality, [[spoiler:that's how the {{Eldritch Abomination}}s used as FTL engines communicate]].

* In Adam Christopher's ''The Burning Dark'', it's the 30th century and humans have mastered jumping into "quick space", though it can still be dangerous and even cause a planet-busting cataclysm. But before finding "quick space", humans were messing with dimensional exploration and discovered "subspace". Believing it to be the fabled hyper-space that would enable FTL travel, humanity quickly learned that subspace is a light-less dimension that's only penetrable by energy -- matter can't cross it. Worse yet, humans learn that there are [[EldritchAbomination psychic monsters]] that live in subspace and to communicate with them is to risk one's sanity. The star system Shadow with its purple star is the only known portal to subspace and strange radiation from the Shadow's sun will erode anything that's not shielded, meanwhile every year people mysteriously disappear from a nearby space station.

* ''A Colder War'' by Creator/CharlesStross. An American military team involved in a black ops project uses a PortalNetwork to travel from Afghanistan to Antarctica. They arrive older and dying of radiation poisoning, having apparently traveled via a place where time runs differently and the sun has gone nova.