Place Before Time

The beginning of the universe is usually seen as the beginning of everything. In Speculative Fiction, that's not always the case. Sometimes the universe/multiverse we know is the most recent reality, and another one existed before it. This previous reality was usually destroyed, but some, usually if they're Another Dimension, still exist. Sometimes it's implied that when the current universe ends, a new one will come about.

Similar to Place Beyond Time in that it exists before our current universe, but time and/or life in some form still existed. While it might involve a Primordial Chaos, one does not strictly imply the other, as a Place Before Time can be just as orderly as the current universe. The inhabitants can range from eldritch abominations to having unique abilities due to following different laws of physics, to being no different from the current life in the universe. They may or may not be Precursors.

Not to be confused with The Land Before Time. See also Caused the Big Bang.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• GaoGaiGar: The Trinary Solar System is located in a universe that predates the Big Bang.
  • King of Kings: GaoGaiGar vs Betterman: When GGG tries to return to the main universe from that of the Trinary Solar System, they end up in the "Orange Site", the place between the Big Crunch of the Previous Universe and the Big Bang of the current one.

Comic Books

• DC Comics:
  • Green Lantern: Relic, the Big Bad from the Lights Out event, came from the universe before the main one. The universe ended up destroying itself by overusing the emotional spectrum, and Relic survived by approaching the Source Wall. His motivation is to prevent it happening again, by taking out the various lantern corps.
  • Lucifer: The Jin en Mok and Silk Men come from the creation before Yahweh's. Somehow they survived into the current universe, and are trying to escape.
  • Shazam!: In Jeff Smith's run, the Rock of Eternity can only be reached by achieving superluminal speeds and going back to slightly before the dawn of time; the glowing pinprick on top of it is in fact the moment/initial expansion point for the whole universe. By going through it, you can access the universe before ours, but it's not a good idea to do so.
  • Swamp Thing: Alan Moore's run suggests that before God said "Let there be light", nothing existed in the universe except Darkness, which still surrounds and permeates our world. The Darkness is sentient and doesn't regard us as much more than a source of indigestion, and in Blackest Night Nekron is sent to annihilate all life to help settle its stomach.
• Marvel Comics:
  • Plays an important part of Galactus's backstory. He was originally a scientist called Galen from a dying universe, and ended up merging with the consciousness of that universe. He ended up living through the new Big Bang and emerged as the Planet Eater we all know. The Ultimates (2015) expands on this by revealing the current multiverse is the seventh (or eighth after Secret Wars (2015)) iteration, with Galactus' universe being sixth. The true Big Bad, the First Firmament, is the original reality and wants to re-establish himself as reality once more.
  • Before the Big Bang, there existed a plane of existence called the Void, sparsely populated by primordial Elder Gods. In Thor God Of Thunder 2014, Gorr the God Butcher travels back in time and cuts out the heart of an infant Elder God to use as part of his Godbomb. Another Elder God and self-proclaimed ruler of the Void was Knull, a god of darkness who was enraged when the Big Bang — courtesy of the Celestials — filled the Void with Light, and created the symbiotes to extinguish it.

Literature

• The Dark Tower: The Prim is an example of both Primordial Chaos and this trope. Before the Dark Tower and the multiverse was established, the Prim was host to various demons and eldritch abominations. The Crimson King is the son of one of these beings, and wants to bring down the Dark Tower so they're free for to dominate reality once more.
• In The Goblin Reservation, all the Little Folk come from colonization attempts by a race that survived the Big Bang by converting their world into a Planet Spaceship. The heroes' main task is an attempt to obtain the MacGuffin that can be traded for all the data that race had accumulated over these billions of years.
• In a similar vein to the Bible, The Silmarillion has Eru Illuvatar create the Timeless Halls before Arda's creation. The Timeless Halls are the home of the various Valar and Maiar, making them older than the world itself.
• Ixtl from The Voyage of the Space Beagle appears to be a creature who survived the Big Bang, and spent all these billions of years adrift in space.
• Doctor Who New Adventures: The Old Ones, the series' take on Lovecraft's creations, come from the universe before the current one.
• In "Murder Mysteries" by Neil Gaiman, God created the Silver City where the angels live before He created the universe, so that the angels would have somewhere to live and work as they helped Him with the universe's construction. Most of the story is a Whole Episode Flashback to events in the Silver City before the universe came into being.
• Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's Norby and the Queen's Necklace: The Others built a time machine into a necklace, using metal they say is from before this universe was made. At the end of the book, they say that they will use this metal to help escape the destruction of this universe.
• Ryn, the main character of The One Who Eats Monsters, is an elder monster from the "Long Ago." She existed before Time was split and began to flow linearly: other gods and monsters remember different pasts than she does because there was no one true Time.

Live-Action TV

• The Arrowverse: The Anti-Matter Universe predates our own. When people travel back to the Dawn of Time, they find themselves in the already-fully-formed Anti-Matter Universe, while our positive matter uni/multiverse is having its Big Bang in the sky overhead.
• Doctor Who: In "The Satan Pit", The Beast claims to have been sealed away by the Disciples of Light before the current universe exists, though the Doctor doesn't believe this.
  • Earlier on in the series, the Sixth Doctor described the pre-universe as a very strange place. Space was green, stars were shaped like donuts, and its laws of physics were so alien to us that they might as well be called magic.
• Good Omens (2019):
  • The opening scene of season 2 is called Before the Beginning and features angel Crowley making stars. Aziraphale helps him out a bit.
• Supernatural introduces the Empty, a void that predates, contains, and will likely outlast the universe as we know it.

Mythology & Religion

• Aztec Mythology: The Five Suns creation story has it that there were four worlds before the current one, each with their own sun god. The previous suns and worlds were destroyed, and the current sun will end with an earthquake unless Human Sacrifice keeps it at bay.
• Some interpretations of The Bible believe that God created Heaven before He created Earth/the physical realm, making Heaven a Place Before Time. Lucifer's rebellion usually takes place before Earth's creation or after the seventh day where God rests. Other interpretations view Heaven is a Place Beyond Time instead, much like God Himself.

Tabletop Games

• In Super Console, the first era is the Timeless Time. Before time and death become a thing, everyone has magic, people live in an Eden with food ripe for picking off the trees, and people just exist without any real purpose. Then evil makes its move, time starts up, people die, and the world heads into the Prehistoric Era.

Video Games

• In Destiny 2: Shadowkeep, The Darkness reveals in the Unveiling lore book that both The Traveler and itself originated in something like this. Using an allegory, it compared the Place Before Time to a garden where every possible form the universe could take was represented by patterns of blooming and dying flowers, and the two of them to a gardener and a winnower, respectively. In truth, they were self-aware ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, without antecedents or descendants, not bound by causality, not part of any great component or schematic in that "garden," and only existed because they had to — in short, they personified the rules that governed whether a flower would bloom or die, and from those rules arose elaborate, shifting patterns in the garden. The Gardener valued complex, ever-evolving and -changing patterns, and grew vexed when one pattern inevitably ended up subsuming all other patterns in the garden, reducing the whole field to sameness, while the Winnower saw this same survival-of-the-fittest simplicity as beautiful. When the Gardener decided to change the nature of the garden by making themselves into a "new rule" that would reward difference, discouraging the vexing pattern from forming, the Winnower attacked them. Their fighting trampled the garden and caused the Big Bang, with both of them becoming god-like paracausal forces in the newborn universe.
• In Outer Wilds, this is what made the Nomai clan that moved to your home star system so obsessed with what they called the Eye of the Universe, a spatial anomaly that they determined was emanating a signal older than the rest of the universe. They did everything in their power to discern the Eye's location, and in their settlements you can find shrines to the Eye where the Nomai pondered its mystery and purpose, and whether or not the Eye was sentient and trying to communicate with them. Whether or not the Eye is intelligent is unclear, but if someone enters it, they can use the Eye to reset the universe after it reaches the end of its natural lifespan, which is exactly what you get to do in the Golden Ending.

Webcomics

• There is an episode, of 8-Bit Theater, in which Sarda sends White Mage back before time. She finds herself arriving in what appears to be an infinite and grey void.
• In Homestuck, the beta kids' universe is created through events in the trolls' universe, so the former is a one, with respect to the latter and the trolls are able to send messages to the humans at any point in the humans' timeline.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: Similar to the Dark Tower, the Lich states that before time or even the nothingness preceding existence, reality was an endless expanse of monsters and other eldritch horrors. It's heavily implied he was one of these, and it's confirmed that Orgalorg/Gunther is a survivor of this era.
• Futurama:
  • "The Day The Earth Stood Stupid": Nibbler reveals that he's a member of the ancient Nibblonian race, whose species emerged 17 years before the Big Bang. Their arch-enemy, the Brainspawn, showed up the millisecond after the Big Bang.
  • "The Beast with a Billion Backs": Yivo states that shklee was alone in shkler own electromatter universe for a trillion years, then heard the Big Bang occur. The tear in reality from time travel abuse allows proper contact with the main universe.
  • "The Late Phillip J. Fry": Professor Farnsworth invents a one-way time machine which he, Bender and Fry accidentally travel to the year 10,000, and plan on travelling to a point where a backwards-time machine is invented. When this fails and they decide to watch the end of the universe, it turns out that a new universe identical to the previous comes into being so they just keep going forward to their "present". This would make every episode set before it a Place Before Time (twice over, in fact) to every episode after, and that there was an identical universe before that.
• Gravity Falls: Bill Cipher originates from a two-dimensional, Flatland-like universe over a trillion years ago and long before the main universe came to be. He ended up "liberating" it by burning it to the ground and has been hopping across realities ever since.

Real Life

• One of the theories for how the Big Bang came to be, the Big Bounce theory, posits that the universe expands, eventually collapses in on itself and rebounds again in a cyclical model. If true, it means that there have been universes before the current one and after as well, in an infinite cycle. It is the happier alternative to the heat death of the universe.
• Another theories claim the origin of the Universe was a quantum fluctuation in a previously existing vacuum (nothingness as understood in quantum physics has nothing to see with the philosophical concept) up to such vacuum being an extremely old Universe, suggesting other Universes could be continuously budding off such way, or in inflationary cosmology's eternal inflation theory that space is continuously inflating and forming new Universes.

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