Portal Network
Simply put, there are lots of "islands of habitability", and conventional travel between them, if possible at all, is time-consuming, expensive, and generally not attempted unless there is absolutely no other choice. However, there is a set of gates or jump points connecting them together, allowing for near-instantaneous travel.
This results in what can be called a "graph universe": the connected islands/communities/planets are vertices and the portal links are edges, and the rationality of travel between them depends not on the distance, but on the existence of a known link between them.
Perhaps equally common throughout all varieties of SpeculativeFiction, except for the "hardest" flavor, which disallows teleportation altogether.
Compare TeleportersAndTransporters. For a videogame sort-of-equivalent, see WarpWhistle.
Examples:
- Perhaps the oldest known examples of this are moongates in the Template:Ultima RPG series and Fringe Gates in the RPG Fringeworthy, the latter of which was an inspiration for Template:Stargate SG-1. However, these also allowed travel through time and between alternate universes, respectively.
- In an old interview, the author of Ultima mentioned the movie Template:Time Bandits as an inspiration for the moongates.
- The Wormgate Network in SchlockMercenary, which is promptly rendered obsolete by our heroes.
- Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels had an interstellar transmat network in it as the major form of space travel.
- MightyMax.
- ThePendragonAdventure books.
- The Netherworld of the TabletopGames FengShui is a mystical realm which allows travel through time via PortalToThePast mystical portals that lead to different junctures in the past, present and future.
- Literary Example/Subversion: The various systems in LoisMcMasterBujold's Vorkosigan Saga are connected by wormholes; there's no indication anyone even knows how to get between the planets by conventional means. However, the wormholes are far apart, and time-consuming conventional travel is required to move between wormholes.
- Eve Online has a jump gate network. While ships do possess a warp drive, these merely accelerate the ship to several AU per second. Obviously, this is not fast enough for interstellar travel, though it IS faster than the speed of light.
A common origin story is to have them created by Template:Precursors:
- The StargateVerse, including Template:Stargate SG-1, StargateAtlantis, but notably not Template:Stargate the original movie, which never clarified if there were other Stargates besides those on Earth and Abydos.
- Babylon 5 had a gate system, only the largest (or most advanced) ships could make their own temporary gate into hyperspace, and even then usually had to navigate hyperspace my homing in on another gate's "beacon".
- Contact, the novel and movie adaptation.
- The Heechee cycle by Frederic Pohl.
- Fading Suns, influenced by Heechee in this respect.
- Manifold: Space by Stephen Baxter
- The mass relay network from Mass Effect was built by the Protheans 50,000 years ago, along with a number of other artifacts. spoiler:They were ''actually'' built by a group of super-advanced artificial intelligences called the Reapers that use them to direct societal evolution along certain lines, making it easier to wipe out all advanced life in the galaxy every 50,000 years.
- An episode of StarTrekTheNextGeneration featured the remnants of a network like this created by the powerful Iconians in the distant past. A ContinuityNod much later episode of StarTrekDeepSpaceNine dealt with what might happen if the same technology fell into the hands of some bad guys.
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