Hyperspace Is A Scary Place - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Uchuu Senkan Yamato's first "space warp" jump is portrayed as a psychedelic experience, with afterimages, Yuki's (Nova's) clothes jumping about a meter to the right, and visions of the Yamato passing over prehistoric Earth, among other things.
- Parodied in Tenchi Muyo GXP, when Wrong Genre Savvy protagonist Seina feels gypped when his first jump into hyperspace features no light show of any kind; he specifically mentions some of the weirdness from Yamato when he describes what he expected.
In Gun Buster, this trope is used as joke to scare the younger space cadets.

Between the Fourth World, the Anti-Monitor, and Mr. Mind the DCU's Multiverse is a scary enough place as-is (assuming it even exists). But then it was officially stated that the Wildstorm universe was set there too, which brought in "The Bleed", the red gap between worlds (named for the space outside the panels of a comic book, of course). You know how radiation is supposed to give superheroes powers? The Bleed actually does that.
- There's also the Phantom Zone, also known as the Still Zone or the Ghost Zone. It's complete whiteness in which you can get lost forever. Zauriel, an angel, even called it "limbo" once.
The times we've seen the dimension Nightcrawler passes through, it resembles hell.
In the Marvel Transformers comics, there's also at least one instance of Cosmic Horrors living in the void between dimensions used as transport medium. When they got their hands on Ramjet, they tortured, unmade, and remade him until they got bored and tossed him back. The result: a not-all-there Ramjet who is simultaneously Cursed With Awesome and Blessed With Suck: Being "tormented" at the hands of these creatures resulted in his becoming Unicron-class powerful, and keeping a connection to the void that gives him all kinds of Reality Warper tricks (above and beyond what he had during his time as an agent of Unicron.) Thanks, evil extradimensional god dudes! On the other hand, he isn't quite sane, and it's all he can do to hold his own atoms together. Not so much fun.
- Later, by the Beast Era, they use the much safer Transwarp technology. Which has a chance of dropping you off anywhere, anywhen if you go off course. Fan convention comics reveal that "anywhere" used to include parallel universes and, presumably, void, until a group from one dimension was nice enough to build a safety net. They keep everyone they catch imprisoned in a single large city, able to move freely about it but not leave.
When facing off against a shadow-wielding enemy, Invincible and his foe get dragged into the shadow dimension. He is warned that there are unseen, horrifying things lurking in there and they make their escape as soon as possible. (These things are likely why the enemy, formerly the sidekick of one of Invincible's father's friends, went insane.)

In Event Horizon, the experimental hyperdrive on the eponymous ship takes it to a dimension of "chaos and evil", according to one of the people who winds up spending a short while there, which is effectively "hell." What's worse, something comes back to our world. Very Lovecraftian. It's a recurring joke among some Warhammer 40K fans that Event Horizon is a prequel.
- Other fans point to Weir as an unnamed Cenobite. At any rate, there's certainly a lot of similarity to both.
In Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, The Oscillation Overthuster allows vehicles to pass through solid matter, through a bizarre dimension filled with weird creatures. One of the first scientists to experiment with it ends up with his head phased into a wall, and gets possessed by an 8th-dimensional nasty, turning him into the main villain of the movie.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the "Stargate" sequence after making contact with the Jovian monolith. The montage is interspersed with quick cuts of the astronaut's various horrifying facial contortions, just to drive the point home. When the sequence is done and the astronaut is in the "hotel", his face is covered in wrinkles, and he looks as if he's going insane.
In the film Supernova hyperspace travel is visually terrifying. It's easy to imagine the energies involved destroying the ships and everybody in them. And what hyperspace does to living tissue if your suspension pod is not functioning perfectly is not something you want to think about.

Larry Niven's 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.
- Niven's Hyperspace also has a "quantum" property that permanently removes from normal space anything that comes too close to a gravity source.
- In later Ringworld books, _things_ living in hyperspace were also mentioned. Plus, in The Mote in God's Eye, the instant travel thing (NOT Known Space hyperspace) confuses people and breaks computers.
While no spacecraft are involved in Robert A Heinlein's And He Built A Crooked House, there is a spot in the tesseract home where the protagonists look past a fourth-dimensional corner and see — nothing. A space where nothing we can understand or perceive exists, not even blackness.
Dickson's Dorsai stories have passengers and crew taking some sort of tranquillizer before a jump, because of the effect hyperspace has on the human nervous system. When Donal Graeme stages a daring raid against an enemy planet in Dorsai!, he uses multiple swift hyperspace jumps to simulate a huge armada attacking his enemy, even though it drives him and his crew to the edge of collapse, with each jump leaving them more and more in pain and disorientation.
W. J. Stuart's novelization of Forbidden Planet has a scene where Doctor Ostrow looking out a viewplate into hyperspace, seeing nothing, under which is a suggestion of distorted stars rushing past at incredible speed. He turns off the 'plate fast.
Timothy Zahn's Cascade Point has a hyperspace which shows you Alternate Universe versions of yourself. Implied to be very disturbing, as it's essentially showing you all the other paths your life could have taken.
Isaac Asimov wrote a Robots story about a computer going mad when asked to design a FTL drive, as the properties of hyperspace meant that humans passing through it were temporarily "dead", and it was programmed to protect human life.
- And don't forget how the computer hoaxed the crew, during history's first FTL jump, making them think they had died and gone to hell. And filled the pantry with nothing but baked beans. That was one warped robot.
  - To be fair, the robot was warped because of the conflict between its imperative to avoid human deaths and the instruction to create the FTL drive, combined with the permission it had been given to fudge the First Law a little and its realization that the death wasn't permanent. This is not dissimilar to the explanation for HAL going insane in 2001: A Space Odyssey; he had built-in safeguards to protect the crew, but was then told to lie to them at the same time those safeguards were relaxed.
Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar books have a form of magical hyperspace, which happens to be filled with a race of precursors that even some Gods fear. Opening a rift is a really, really bad idea.
The Star Wars Expanded Universe has a Hyperspace that's rather less dangerous than some of the other examples, but there are risks. A ship in hyperspace doesn't properly exist in realspace, but can be brought out by gravity wells. In the case of planets and asteroids that means appearing in realspace in time to safely change direction and go into hyperspace again; in the case of stars, black holes, and powered-up Imperial Interdictors it doesn't. That's why it's considered dangerous to stray out of established hyperspace routes, and mapping new ones is hazardous. It's also noted that getting Thrown Out The Airlock is instantly fatal when in hyperspace, unlike in realspace when it might take a bit. One novel describes "Hyper-rapture", a form of madness caused by staring at hyperspace for too long; because of this, starships usually have windows that go opaque while in hyperspace. Beyond that, Marvel Star Wars introduced "otherspace", a dimension beyond hyperspace, a weird place with its own inhuman inhabitants; the effect is spoiled when said inhabitants are pretty much just big (read: Wookiee-sized) mean bugs.
- Staring into hyperspace for an extended period of time, if it doesn't give you "hyper-rapture", is said to make most people increasingly uneasy. It doesn't look "right." Death Star quietly underlines Darth Vader's evil/otherness/disconnect from humanity by noting that he likes staring into hyperspace, and doesn't feel the usual relief when his ship comes out into realspace again; similarly, Luke Skywalker And The Shadows Of Mindor has Cronal liking it.
- This is mentioned when one of the most evil villains in the Expanded Universe is given a Fate Worse Than Death—by being locked in an escape pod and ejected into hyperspace. Note that one escape pod has enough food and water to keep him alive for months, non-opaquing windows, and a very small area; he'd either go stir-crazy, get hyper-rapture, or survive those long enough to die from lack of supplies. Not to mention that rescue is literally impossible. Very, very bad indeed.
- If this troper recalls, going through a gravity well of sufficient size overloads your hyperdrive motivator (what you need to get in and out of hyperspace) and kicks you out of hyperspace; when you over load it, it can explode possibly taking the ship with it, so there's actually a saftey feature that kicks you out before you run the risk of exploading. That's how a fleet of ships got most of the way through a system wide interdiction field around Centerpoint station but still had to conduct repairs.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
Ford: [Hyperspace is] unpleasantly like being drunk.
Arthur: What's so unpleasant about being drunk?
Ford: Ask a glass of water.
- Teleportation is also dangerous:
  I teleported home one night
  With Ron and Sid and Meg.
  Ron stole Meggie's heart away
  And I got Sidney's leg.
- As Arthur learns in Mostly Harmless, Hyperspace is even scarier than he suspected; as the resident of a Plural Zone, every time he travelled through it he ran the risk of being catapulted into an Alternate Universe.
- Travelling through a Dark Matter sleeve, as Wowbagger's ship does in And Another Thing, is even freakier, enhancing your emotions, and putting you in touch with aspects of yourself you never knew about. If Hyperspace is unpleasantly like being drunk, dark matter travel is unpleasantly like being knurd.
Stephen King's short story The Jaunt features a family waiting to be instantaneously teleported from Earth to Mars, in a process that first requires them to be gassed unconscious. The father tells his two children a bowdlerized version of how the technique came to be discovered and why the gas is needed, skipping over the gruesome semi-apocryphal account of the first man to make the trip awake. Unfortunately the son hears enough to be curious about what the trip is like, so holds his breath when the gas is administered. The father wakes up on the other end to witness his cackling white-haired son clawing his own eyes out: The physical trip is indeed instantaneous, but the mental journey... well... "It's longer than you think, Dad! Longer than you think!!"
- Worse than that, there's a mention of a man who'd set out to murder his wife by sending her through a jaunt gate, and not entering a destination. His lawyers argued at his trial that no one could actually prove the woman was dead, and the court promptly threw the book at him because the thought of her being lost forever in mid-jaunt, alive, was so horrifying.
In C. S. Friedman's This Alien Shore, hyperspace (called ainniq) is inhabited by creatures called sana. No one is quite sure what exactly a sana is, as they are imperceptible to human eyes, but common consensus is that average human being has extremly short life expectancy upon entering ainniq. There are people who can see sana and navigate starships to safety; the problem is, they also happen to be clinically insane.
Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time has the "Ways", which is a sort of terrestrial hyperspace: mystic gates — usable by anyone — to Another Dimension, which handles distance differently and thus allows shortcuts between the gates. Unfortunately, the Ways were built by Male Channellers after being tainted (though they weren't yet insane), and as such have decayed into a lightless, crumbling world haunted by Machin Shin, a terrible ghost-like monster whom even the minions of evil fear.
- Less scary is the void accessed by the "Skimming" technique, which allows a channeler to travel on a platform of their creation through an empty void and directly travel to any known destination they choose. There are problems, however; fall off the platform and you fall forever, question the reality of the platform and it starts to fade away, and creating exits from the void where you aren't supposed to is simply a Very Bad Idea.
The Gray Limbo in Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy. A virtually addictive "nothing": there's nothing to see, but it's still hard to look away. Can drive a person mad. To top it off, upsilon field transition (aka jumping to hyperspace) is incredibly painful to intelligent beings, and becomes more so the faster you intend to travel once in the Limbo. So painful, the effective top speed of a craft is determined by how much pain a person can stand without going insane or dying. Humans top out at around 180df (light-years per twelve hours), with two notable exceptions: Jack Remillard, a bodiless brain, who tops out around 400df, and the main antagonist, who figures out a way to enter the Limbo in effectively naked skin just before his Heel Face Turn, topping out at 18,000df, and then one of the primary causes of his Heel Face Turn is being given a pain mitigator — whereupon he travels several billion light-years to another galaxy in seven hops.
- The Ships are a race of giant interplanetary beings who can be convinced to consume a passenger vessel and serve as spaceships through The Power Of Love. One of them made the same several-billion-light-year journey in a single hop, albeit dying in the process.
Continua-craft in Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast don't directly show any scariness as travel is instantaneous. However there is a slight downside in that inventing one or even just working on the math required to invent one will get you murdered by demons. Well, actually hermaphroditic lobster-aliens who just happen to look like demons.
In a Cordwainer Smith story The Game of Rat And Dragon, ships travel via a kind of Jump drive and hyperspace is a non-issue. On the other hand, there are Horrible Things (humans think of them as dragons, and are terrified - this story was written before Our Dragons Are Different got up any steam) lurking in the darkness of space between the stars. They can be killed with intense light, but human reflexes aren't up to scratch. On the other hand, cats think of them as rats...
- Cordwainer Smith also wrote a number of other stories containing hyperspaces which are scary places. Scanners Live In Vain has long travel through normal space induce pain and suicidal urges in unmodified humans; in The Colonel Came Back From Nothing At All the eponymous Colonel has his mind taken to be a pet for something during the test of an experimental "planoform" drive; and Drunkboat has travel through space3 cause temporary insanity and coupled with inexplicable powers.
Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space universe also doesn't use hyperspace per se, but its FTL is still a pretty bad idea. So bad that using it carries an extremely high risk of retroactively erasing its users from time (i.e. they are made to die before the ship was launched). Even races that have been spacefaring for millions of years stick with slower than light travel.
- It's been said in at least one of his books that the use of FTL has caused entire CIVILIZATIONS to be retroactively erased from the universe.
Honor Harrington 'verse: People become violently ill from "crash translations" through layers of hyperspace.
- The effects of stars interacting get's impressed on to Hyperspace creating Gravity Waves that creates strong shearing effects on the ship. These waves can extend in hyperspace for light years and some systems are completely inside them. For the first few centuries, Hyperspace travel was a crapshoot. Then the Warshawski sails and grav sensors were invented which made Space Is An Ocean. It actually made the sails faster, but combat in hyperspace is dangerous because most travel routes use the Grav Waves and losing a sail in a Grav Wave will cause the ship to be ripped apart.
  - Actually that is not completely right. Losing one or more of your Alpha Nodes (used to create the Warshawski Sail in the first place) and with that the Sail just leaves you with no means to steer. You'd be ripped apart in the first gravitic shear because of it, but you could actually get free of the grav wave with conventional thrusters, allthough that would take a lot of time and you'd likely meet a shear before getting free. ;) On the topic of the translation: translations at every velocity cause nausea and momentary loss of balance. The effect get's worse the higher the base velocity is. There are other strange effects in Hyper - like you can't see very far (even with state of the art sensors), navigation is a royal pain, you can't translate in or out of hyper above 30% of Lightspeed and you lose 92% of your base velocity during translation. But you know, it may not be the best way to travel faster than light. It's the ONLY way to travel faster than light, at least in Honorverse *g*
Dragonriders Of Pern: Between, through which dragons and fire-lizards teleport, is all gray and freezing cold. It's also the dragon method of suicide.
- It also has no air. Dragons can hold their breaths for a surprisingly long time, but this is rather inconvenient for their human riders.
In the novels that describe CJ Cherryh's "Alliance Union" universe, entry into "jumpspace" is psychologically traumatic for most humans, requiring them to drug themselves with tranquillisers for the passage. A few individuals are able to tolerate the transfer and remain conscious "in-jump". They are nicknamed "nightwalkers", a term that suggests the mixed feelings with which they are viewed. On the one hand, they make excellent navigators, and are able to react far faster when the ship comes out of jump than their doped-up crewmates. On the other, the rest of the crew wonder what nightwalkers get up to as they wander round the ship while everyone is asleep...
- It's harder on stsho: without tranq, they just die. Hani don't need precautions; the non-nightwalkers are just useless in jump (and they all shed horribly after). Methane-breathers, who knows. One of the scarier things about the kif is the hints that all animal life from their world are nightwalkers.
In Brass Man by Neal Asher, viewscreens are usually blanked out while ships are travelling through underspace, but Ian Cormac suddenly finds that he can see something there. Apparently it's part of his ascension to a higher plane of existence.
In the Broken Sky series, the space between the two worlds (that is, the Dominions and Kirin Taq) is shown to drive anyone not specially trained to live in it insane. Indeed, in one of the later books Kia loses her memory simply from seeing a glimpse of it after a failed jump between worlds.
Andalite ships in Animorphs are capable of traveling through Zero-Space, a horrible, totally blank, N-dimensional void. Ships passing through are usually safe, but in one book, Ax was catapulted into Zero-Space, and discovered the full effects of the void before being rescued. Not only was he swiftly dying from lack of oxygen, but the non-dimensional nature of Zero-Space forced him to see his own body from all directions, including inside, even as his hearts began to slow.
- Ax also mentions at one point that, when morphing into larger or smaller creatures, mass is taken or stored away temporarily as a balloon in Zero-Space to compesnate for the size discrepancy. If the characters sharing terrified looks of their mass floating in the middle of nowhere isn't enough, Ax also mentions that there's a one-in-a-billion chance that an Andalite ship traveling through Zero-Space may run into the mass, which would then be incinerated by the ship's energy shields. Squick.
- Well, that was the theory... until Ax and the rest of the team were pulled into Z-space by a passing Andalite ship and experience what is decribed in the first bullet. Essentially they were pulled along in its "wake" instead of being incinerated. Both of the above examples are actually the same incident, which would have killed the team if not for Ax using his thought-speak to contact the Andalites on the ship and getting everyone beamed aboard in time.
In Perdido Street Station, the universe that the Weaver travels through is described like a spiders' web with strands going through more than just the three dimensions and connecting every aspect of existence. It is implied that the physical universe the main characters inhabit is only one facet of this meta-reality.
The British Sonic The Hedgehog novels had the Warps of Confusion (aka the Special Zone from Sonic 1) which Robotnik was able to tap into to teleport his ships around the planet. Anyone who's played the original game knows just how well those areas fit this trope.
- Fleetway's Sonic The Comic treats the Special Zone in a similar manner. It's a weird place where physics don't really apply, and a planet and an asteroid belt and some swirly things can comfortably be the same place. The characters originally considered it to be some kind of insane 'other place' you really didn't want to spend too long in, and are shocked to later discover it's inhabited. Of course, the locals aren't exactly normal, either.
In the early Terry Pratchett novel The Dark Side of the Sun, ships travel through "interspace" in which all possibilities are true. Most ships are shielded against the trippy hallucinatory results. Another book, Strata, has a similar concept, but trips through hyperspace are noted in text with asides like "(a brief moment of nothingness, an eternity of despair)".
There is an interesting take on this trope in the Sergei Lukyanenko novel The Stars Are Cold Toys, in which 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 putting themselves into a coma by mentally dividing by zero and causing an overflow error, and the latter by temporarily pulling the Kualkua collective consciousness out of that particular Kualkua.
- The sequel, Star Shadow, reveals that jump drive is a product of human belief, not actual science. That is why it only works for humans.
William Gibson's short story Hinterlands describes a point in space between Earth and Mars in which space ships radiating energy at "the broadcast frequency of the hydrogen atom" disappear. Sometimes they return, sometimes with some fragment of an alien culture. The alien artefact may be useless or invaluable. But the returning pilots are always dead on arrival or the strongest of them make it through a few weeks of catatonia or drooling madness before committing suicide.
In David Drake's RCN series, ships generate a bubble universe around themselves to travel through the "Matrix" (no relation) of fourth-dimensional space, outside the normal universe where the normal physical laws apply. Too much time spent in the Matrix takes a toll on the human brain, and crews start to see things that aren't there, though it's implied that in some cases they may be seeing into alternate realities rather than hallucinating.
In L. E. Modesitt's Gravity Dreams, hyperspace not only requires a Training From Hell to be able to navigate through, it also has a god who wants some reassurance that he is a god.
The Doctor Who Expanded Universe has lots of stuff about the terrors of the Time Vortex the TARDIS travels through. The series itself, not so much.
The Gap that Stephen R Donaldson's Gap Cycle is named after isn't in itself more dangerous than regular space travel, but it does have some... unfortunate effects on the brains of a certain small percentage of humans that pass through it. This "Gap sickness" can manifest as just about any sort of mental illness, it is entirely incurable, and there is no way to predict who will contract it without actually sending them through the Gap and seeing who goes insane.
Anytime The Lost 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.
This troper remembers one story that used "origami points" for FTL. Going through it involved seeing a variety of people throughout a bunch of parallel time lines with the "closest lines" being the most easily understood but the lives are almost all connected. Most people take something to knock them out for a bit. This doesn't sound very scary untill we read about the heroine going through lightly drugged and realizing that all her parallels are dying off, implying the same will happen to her fairly shortly. Nice.
In The Speaker for the Dead trilogy of the Enders Game series, a highly advanced AI is able to move things instantly from any point in the universe to any other as long as it has a clear understanding of the objects/people it's moving, as well as their origin and destination points. It does this by moving them outside of the universe. The weirdest part is that if a person spends any noticeable length of time "outside", they can conciously or sub-conciously manifest anything their brain can imagine and bring it back into the real world with them... including people.
John Meaney's Pilot stories have mu-space, a fractal space which normal humans have to be sedated for travel through and which has all sorts of weird properties. The Pilots who can traverse it while conscious either have to have their eyes replaced with sockets for computer attachments, or naturally have weird eyes (the first of these is the result of a Pilot giving birth whilst in mu space, and the trait then spreads). The Pilots are implied to be drifting away from what we would recognise as a human perspective.

Hyperspace in Babylon 5, while less scary than most hyperspaces in this entry, is still rather nasty. It has random currents that can throw you off course rather quickly if you have a navigational failure, no (well, nearly no) landmarks to navigate by, and there's even some rumors about things living in it. (They're true, and though some of them are just annoying, there are lots of things that are far from nice.) And then there's the eponymous Thirdspace...
Star Trek normally doesn't treat subspace as a bad thing. There are some exceptions, though:
- Subspace containing aliens who like vivisecting humans.
- Wormholes containing Sufficiently Advanced Aliens the Bajorans thought of as the prophets.
- The Next Generation also had an episode about "transporter psychosis", in which perpetual hypochondriac Barkley sees things moving while he's in the beam. Creepy and effective, up until one of them gets close enough to see that they're sock puppets (well, not really, but equally silly-looking wormlike Muppets), turning it into a Narm moment.
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture also had a sequence where the Enterprise's transporter isn't set up properly and the results are really rather unpleasant.
  Transporter Chief: Enterprise, what we got back didn't live long... fortunately.
- The Canon Discontinuity Voyager episode "Threshold" almost treated Warp 10 like this, but the actual results fell into Wall Banger territory.
  - Some incoherent reasoning used in explaining that Warp 10 is somehow "infinite" speed, which the logical statement alone is just all kinds of wrong, but then turning off the engine somehow causes the ship to return right back to where it had started. And then it turned Tom Paris into a reptile. EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.
Wormholes in Farscape are treacherous and difficult to navigate, and cause all sorts of tricky problems with time and space and turning into liquid when you don't quite understand them, and are inhabited by wormhole creatures that are also sentient aliens of dubious morality. On the other hand, one episode dealt with the dangers of Starburst, which is a short-range FTL technology that works by temporarily slipping into another dimension and coming out pretty quickly. Somehow, the ship Moya gets stuck and splayed out in other dimensions - one of which causes mind-splitting noise, another which causes visual pain, and a third which causes elation and euphoria, in addition to the normal one - and has to be reassembled by moving all four ships in unison through the dimension while avoiding the interdimensional gatekeeper monster... thing.
The Tomorrow People were presumably safe when jaunting through hyperspace. If they jaunted into hyperspace without protective gear, their bodies would be annihilated. Additionally, hyperspace was seen as a place where time had no meaning, but you'd return to your own time upon leaving. That is, unless some major temporal screw-up had occurred, which ran the possibility of freezing time temporarily.

Subverted hilariously in Qui Nguyen's play Fight Girl Battle World, in which the Human is told to brace for hyperspace, which then turns out to be funky hip-hop music. Everyone bobs their head in time. The human eventually catches on.

In Warhammer 40000, hyperspace, here called the Warp or the Immaterium, is essentially Hell. A manifestation of the desires and hates of all conscious life, brimming with soul-eating daemons and dark gods, it's also the origin, power source and curse of all Psychic Powers. Ships need special Geller Fields to keep the entities that swarm through the Immaterium from passing right through the hull and feasting on the minds and souls of all within. In addition, the Warp sometimes generates Negative Space Wedgies called Warp Storms, where it spills into realspace. It's never a good idea to be on any planet caught anywhere near one of these. Whole regions of space have been caught in Warp Storms, which of course doesn't do the populations of inhabited planets therein any good. And even when the storms recede, the planets returned like shipwrecks exposed by a receding ocean are... different.
- How bad is the Warp? The Tau Earth Caste cheerfully use any and all technologies to help spread the Greater Good. After their experiments on Medusa V, they've basically decided "screw that, too many tentacles" and are sticking with their much-slower-but-won't-lead-to-daemons-raping-the-flat-bit-of-neck-where-your-head-used-to-be method, which just skims the edges of the Warp; it's rather like sticking to the coastline - you don't get very far out, but that also means you avoid the sharks. Except that in this case the sharks are the size of your ship, and are able to pass through the hull and eat the crew, and drive you mad to look at them.
- There are also the Eldar webway tunnels, which are passages through what is essentially another dimension between the Materium and the Immaterium. Whereas the Warp is pure chaos, the Webway is more akin to Alien Geometries; rational and internally consistent, yet utterly alien.
- This isn't all. A special Psychic known as a Navigator must follow a special psionic beacon known as the Astronomican, which is described as being like a lighthouse beacon in an immensely dark tunnel. Failure to correctly follow the Astronomican will result in the ship being lost in the Warp. The fluff has described ships as heading into the warp only to emerge centuries after they first entered, centuries BEFORE they entered, arriving thousands of light years off-course, or coming right back out seconds later, having done nothing at all. This is because the warp is a metaphorical river that flows backwards, forwards, up, down, here and there. You do not want to know what happens to those consumed by Daemons, it's far, FAR worse than feeble "feasting".
- If you take a look at who actually uses the Warp, only those who serve the Imperium shit their pants at the very thought. The Eldar use the webway, so they are beyond reach of the daemons roaming the Warp (until they die, anyway). The Orcs may use the Warp, but they probably find all the mindraping good fun and wouldn't care one bit if they died in the Warp and were 'doomed' to fight daemons forever. Tyranids do use the Warp, but are likely to have either mastered it so as to be able to use it without ill effects, or be immune to mindrape. Even if they are suspectible to both physical and psychic attacks, they would not care about the consequences of either as long as the Swarm gets through alive and well enough to munch down on some planets. The Tau don't use the Warp at all, as well as the Necrons. As for Chaos, most of them are so screwed up anyway that they would hardly notice the effects of the Warp.
The game Fading Suns uses an inversion: hyperspace (what is between the Stargates) actually is the safe way. The real problem is that interstellar space (beyond Kuiper's Belt) is filled with shapeless Cthulhoid monstrosities going by the lovely name of Void Kraken. Still, spaceships jumping through hyperspace need to be protected by special shields, because otherwise people experience a strongly addictive quasi-religious epiphany. And fun stuff: before the discovery of Solar System's 'Gate, there were several sleeper ships sent. If This Troper remembers correctly, one of them was referenced in canon. The rest... Well, the general assumption is it's better not to think of what could have happened to the passengers.
While not used for space travel, Porté sorcery in the RPG 7th Sea involves tearing a bleeding hole in reality, stepping through into an hyperspace-like dimension, and tearing open another hole to get back. No one knows what this dimension is like, because Porté sorcerers keep their eyes closed while inside it. Within this dimension, voices try to persuade or trick the sorcerer into opening their eyes. It's assumed that the sorcerers who never came back made the mistake of opening their eyes.
- It's not at all related that the country where most Porté sorcerers live also has ghosts without eyes or hands that appear in its mirrors. No, surely not.
- In later supplemental material, it is revealed that nearly all magic in the world of Theah weakens a barrier in a shadowy world that keeps an army of eldritch abominations at bay, and that every use of Porte magic to rip a hole in reality also rips a corresponding hole in the barrier.
In the cosmology of Magic: The Gathering, the space between planes (sometimes called the Blind Eternities) will instantly kill anyone other than a Planeswalker upon arrival without serious magical protection (either fundamentally transforming the nature of the traveler, or bringing along a pocket or tunnel of normal space to ride in or pass through). The constantly-shifting currents of metaphysical energy look pretty bizarre, but at least they don't drive people insane... of course, that could only be because even Planeswalkers will be killed by it before they have a chance to go nuts.
In Traveller different cultures have different customs and/or superstitions about it. Among them, Vilani dim their lights (from when having enough power to go into jump was an issue), Aslan clans light a sacramental candle, Vargr, as the violent types, beat up one of their crewmates chosen for the honor, and the Droyne use special coins. Jump space is not so much feared as it is weird. If a jump works wrong one could be misjumped to a random point, which could mean anywhere. If it works really wrong, one stays in jumpspace, and no one knows what happens.

Although not technically hyperspace, the plot of the Doom series revolves around teleporters that work by routing the teleported matter through Hell itself — the demons eventually notice the unexpected entry and even less expected exits and come through the teleporters themselves. In Doom 3, it's specifically stated that the Martian civilization's use of this technology nearly drove them into extinction, and it took a Heroic Sacrifice on the part of their entire species to send the demons back and close up the portals again before they could conquer the universe.
- As with Event Horizon, Doom is itself often jokingly cited as an example of ancient history within the Warhammer 40k universe... which would mean the Doomguy has to be The Emperor... Oh hells yeah!
Half Life has a similar premise: Xen is a parallel dimension that looks as if bits of planet and atmosphere, as well as predatory xenofauna, were transported there at random. Teleporters need to pass their signal through a Xen relay in order to return their loads to normal space. The relay is initially (when the technology was first created) a big machine attached to a crystal on Xen, but is subsequently "compressed" all the way to nothing; Half-Life 2 tells us that rag-tag Resistance teleporters simply swing around Xen like a dimensional sligshot, making teleportation cheaper and a bit safer.
- On the other hand, Combine teleportation takes the hard way and rips a hole in the universe. It does have some advantages, like the Combine being able to go to any universe they choose and wherever in a given universe, but teleportation relying on Xen is cheaper and uses much less machinery, as well as able to perform intradimensional travel (as opposed to Combine teleportation which is only capable of travel between dimensions). Some factions can even use it without machinery at all, like the GMan, who conveniently disappears through what is either teleportation of a crapload of hidden doors before you ever get close. Also, the Vortgaunts seem to like where/when/whatever plane of existance the GMan keeps using and taking Gordon to, so much so as to wrench him back into reaility from it once or twice. Maybe it's because they appear to be Xen natives...
And the utterly forgotten 80's RPG Space Quest had N-Space filled to the bursting with Voidsharks, 'Temblons' (think kraken with tractor-beam tentacles) and other horrors that all seemed to find carbon based life a tasty treat.
In the Star Control universe, Hyperspace is quite nice. Quasispace (Hyperspace's Hyperspace) is even nicer! But God help you if you use "Dimensional Fatigue" technology. The Androsynth tried it, and they all disappeared overnight. The Orz appeared during this event, strange creatures who are difficult to understand, implied to be merely projections of some greater being from Hyperspace's or Quasispace's Mirror Universe, and will happily kill you if you ask about the Androsynth. Merely trying to research the fate of the Androsynth is enough to attract the attentions of Eldritch Abominations.
- Also of note is the fact that Hyperspace isn't a total walk in the park; according to the backstory, the shift between dimensions causes intense nausea, much like a hyperactive space seasickness.
- The eerie background music playing while your ship travels through Quasispace really helps get the "scary place" feeling across. Some of it sounds like the screams or yells of... something.
In the sequel (of disputed canonicity) to the RTS Homeworld, Homeworld: Cataclysm, the central enemy came from Hyperspace. This was a little disturbing for everyone, as until then Hyperspace has been thought to be perfectly safe (assuming you had a safe way of getting in and out of it). The Naggarok, an alien exploration vessel using an experimental form of hyperdrive, essentially went 'too deep', or something similar, resulting in it picking up a passenger in the form of a sentient biomatter virus.
- Interestingly, in an early script for Homeworld 2, the radiation clouds from a damaged hyperspace core were instead written as an area of space in which ships would be sucked into fiery tentacled hyperspace gates. The script describes them as "looking like they lead straight into hell". This interpretation would fit well with all the other religious symbolism in the game, but I can see why they dropped it; The radiation shields the Higarrans eventually implement are much more believable than "portal into hell" shields.
In Elite, a trip into hyperspace (or witch-space, as the game calls it) puts you at risk from ambush from Thargoids, who have a technology which allows them to lurk there. In some versions of the game you can force a hyperdrive failure by holding full pitch and roll while jumping, but you'd have to be either suicidal or very well armed to attempt it.
In Frontier Elite II, mis-jumps sometimes occur, which usually just results in your ship emerging from Hyperspace too early but still with enough fuel to complete the jump. A severe mis-jump could have you emerge from Hyperspace in uncharted space thousands of light years from any inhabited system while simultaneously turning your hyperdrive into a pile of useless scrap metal. Fun.
In Xenosaga, the UMN, source of faster than light travel & communications is also the source of the nightmarish creatures known as the Gnosis. This turns out to be because it is actually humanity's collective unconscious.
In Sword Of The Stars, the humans and the Zuul use a specific dimension called 'nodespace' to allow their ships to ignore the rules of physics. Unfortunately, nodespace is inhabited by Energy Beings known as 'specters', who do not appreciate the intrusion and will occasionally cross over into real space and eat the population of one of your colonies to display their displeasure. The Zuul are especially at risk because of their manner of accessing nodespace: For an analogy, the spectres' annoyance at humanity would be like if you were sitting at home and someone came streaking through your living room, entering and leaving through your front door — the Zuul would be the guy who entered your living room by drilling his way through the walls with a pneumatic drill, and exiting by drilling through the wall at the opposite end. In the nude.
- In addition, looking directly into Node Space turns out to have really bad psychological side effects, and after a few unfortunate murder-suicides all human ships now shut all external views of their ships while performing node jumps. No-one knows what effects Nodespace has on the Zuul mind — not that anyone really wants to know anyway.
- The one and only time a Liir tried to enter nodespace on a human vessel, the second it felt the psychic emanations from nodespace it tore open the ship from the inside to avoid going through. Thankfully everyone onboard was fully suited.
The Shadow Shard in City Of Heroes is like this, if only because almost all the monsters found in the place are Demonic Spiders. Of course, the land scape is trippy as hell, and that does a lot to turn it into one of the most unused zones in the game.
Toe Jam And Earl 2's Hyperfunk Zone is a most totally jammin' version of this.
The scariness of subspace in the FreeSpace series has less to do with subspace itself than the insinuation that using it for FTL travel will cause a horde of enraged Starfish Aliens, who may or may not actually live in subspace, with Nigh Invulnerable spacecraft to come and wipe your species out for their "sin".
- ...Or so goes one Epileptic Tree, anyway.
The Halo universe's hyperspace is known as slipspace. Technicians sometimes had to repair the drives while in mid-jump, exposing themselves to the "slipstream" and risking injury, death, or even being completely erased from existence in the process.
The Eve Online expansion Apocrypha added star systems that are only accessible by wormholes and full of strange, sentient and Always Chaotic Evil machines called the Sleepers. This turned out to be a case of Gameplay And Story Segregation: the players found these systems less scary than intended, mapped them, colonized them and deciphered the Sleeper AI to safely farm them.
In Immortal Defense, you are the reason hyperspace is a scary place, since you're an immortal disembodied spirit with god powers, and you tend to tear apart fleets.
Touhou has boundary youkai Yukari and her "gaps", which she uses to instantly travel anywhere she desires. They manifest as literal tears in the fabric of reality, through which is seen a pitch black realm of nothing populated exclusively by giant unblinking eyes. It is unknown whether anyone besides her can traverse these "gaps" without loss of life and/or sanity, though it seems that only she (and probably her shikigami) is aware of their utility.

The plotholes and portals of The Protectors Of The Plot Continuum are surprisingly safe, given that most other HQ technology will ignite or explode Once A Mission. Traveling through plotholes is a little unpleasant and the logic loopholes can get around an Agent's neck pretty easily, but they are inconveniences at worst, and typically less bad than withstanding more Urple Prose. Metaspace like in HQ, however, or elsewhere that too many natural portals exist, tend to channel the words and thoughts of Suevian authors as a sort of psychic noise. Without an effective white noise system to counter it, it can drive people insane. Insaner. The Jaunt is also used as an execution method.

In X-Men Evolution, the dimension Nightcrawler teleports through is shown to be a hell-like place where monsters dwell... or did, until they got out.
- However, this use of hell isn't "A place of endless torture and horror" but more like "Lots of lava." And the monsters are just red velociraptors. Nightcrawler even comments it was "Not a place I'd vacation, but still wild."
- This plot was also used in the original comics with Illyana Rasputin's "stepping-discs", which moved the users through the demon-filled Limbo.
Kup of the Transformers, a giant mechanical war veteran, is still given "the shivers" by hyperspace (known to the Autobots as "The Void").
Spoofed mercilessly in the Family Guy Star Wars episode, where it shows the Fourth Doctor opening.

Appears in the Herpex spoof ad.

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