As a scientific concept, hyperspace is questionable and unproven. It is a vague term, describing the ability to shatter the speed of light by slipping outside of conventional four-dimensional reality, into an ether zone where you can travel from any point in the galaxy to another without being bound by physics. But as a literary device, hyperspace is indispensable: Without it, all science fiction would take place in our solar system.

Scifi writers have been trying to conquer the difficulty of moving their stories past the boundaries of our solar system since the Golden Age of the genre. The first known reference comes was in 1634, in Johannes Kepler's Somnium, which posited that demons could be enlisted to bring men to the moon, but it was Isaac Asimov who truly popularized the term and the concept in the minds of genre readers. Asimov's hyperspace -- described in countless stories from the 1940s to 1990s -- allows instant teleportation or "jumps" between solar systems with the aid of hyperspace drives. His protagonists invariably describe the feeling of a hyperspace jump as being one of "a momentary insideoutness."

Nearly every book series that takes place outside of our solar system features hyperspace. In Dune, computers are outlawed by religious decree, so hyperspace jumps are only capable by complex calculation and a mystical second sight provided by overdosing on the spice melange. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth is destroyed to create a hyperspace bypass, and undertaking a jump is described as "being unpleasantly like being drunk."

But if anything, hyperspace is even more prominent in film.

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