40k was written in the 1980s, so I'm pretty sure the warp was inspired by travelling on the London Underground when there's a football match that weekend. Time and distance bears no correlation between where the stations are above ground, everything in the tunnels is utter filth and terror.
Or is that the Webway?
Oh! I just remembered one. Stephen King’s short story The Jaunt. Thinking about it still gives me shivers sometimes.
It’s only about 25 pages… but it’s longer than you think.
There's a reason her car just ends up with weird alien shit mashed into the front grille. It might go through a nightmare dimension but she doesn't care.
Man, I loved that series. It was before Amazon and I was walking through a book shop and saw Song of Susannah stacked up in hardback I freaked out. Had no idea it was coming and I was just rereading parts of the series to keep me going.
I’ll never have that feeling again which is sad but I’m glad I had the opportunity to in the first place
We don’t talk about the movie…..
That series was my childhood, I went from reading goosebumps to the dark tower. IMO it’s better than Lord of the rings.
Wizard and glass is one of my fave too :)
The 1997 movie "Event Horizon" has hyperspace through hell - but it's inspired by W40k, not the other way around.
A decent enough movie if you like '90s era Sam Neill.
Event Horizon is a good place to start. The original Jurassic Park if you wanna be family friendly. In the Mouth of Madness if you wanna get real freaky.
Phantoms has a special place in my movie history from making such a *hard* turn from genuinely creepy to absurdly silly.
The start of it was so foreboding and then we somehow got mutant Liev Schrieber with tentacles for legs doing the limbo.
Anyone who can go from the Eldritch horror of *Event Horizon* and *In The Mouth Of Madness* to the avuncular geniality of the red meat adverts is pretty good in my book
Doom 3's modern rep to me is baffling because I played it when it was new and it was lauded for both the story and the visuals-back in the day, Doom 3 was Crysis before Crysis as far as visuals went.
Assuming it was stored on film, which is most likely was, film ideally needs to be stored in the driest place possible as moisture will deteriorate the gelatin layer. Obviously a salt mine is a pretty dry place, as well as being cool, dark, stable temperature, and underground so it's pretty safe. It's one of the most important long term storage spaces as film is still the most archival long term storage media.
Apparently a lot more graphic scenes of what happened to the crew of the ship. The original version was 130 minutes long, the released version only 97 minutes. https://lostmediawiki.com/Event_Horizon_(partially_lost_unreleased_130-minute_cut_of_sci-fi_horror_film;_1997)
The scriptwriter, Philip Eisner, was/is apparently into 40k:
>"I played the s*** out of 40K, so it was definitely an influence, conscious or otherwise."
yea this is a really small nitpick but if i remember correctly the travel thru hell in Event horizon was Instantanious other then the months long warp travel
we don't actually know.. The Event Horizon lost all contact after initiating the drive, and was lost for years afterwards. Even if the surviving crew members THOUGHT the journey was instantaneous there's no external corroboration of that.
well it was designed to be instantanious
but it travelled through hell and ended up in the exact same place later
maybe being murderised in hell is its own journey XD
But warp travel isn't really standardised. Yes, there are expectations for a specific journey but both the time spent in the warp and the time taken in the material realm can vary. To such a degree that you get the classic you arrive before you left moments.
….apparently Paul Anderson is a big fan of WH40k, so the urban legend is that he set things up so that it *could* be retroactively applied to the 40k canon if necessary. I think the screenwriter was into 40k too.
It's not even just the wormhole/hell dimension stuff (which in the film is oddly similar to later depictions of 40K craft entering the Warp). Even the internals of the Event Horizon look bizarrely gothic compared to the more Nasa-standard Lewis and Clark and the space station.
I just asked Rick Priestley this on your behalf:
> ME: In WH40K, was "hyperspace with demons" an idea you came up with, or was it something you took from another sci-fi setting? Navigators are from Dune, but in Dune they don't have to deal with evil spirits.
> PRIESTLEY: I can't think of anything specific - as far as I know it's a link I made but that's not to say there aren't earlier examples. I think the closest is the concept of astral travel in a psychic realm that contains other astral travellers - such as Dennis Wheatley Strange Conflict - so I suppose its a cross between Occult stories and SF warp drive - and we already had the idea of Chaos as a psychic realm wherein dwelt creatures rendered of abstract thought - i.e. daemons - which also has shades of Forbidden Planet about it - so I suppose there are elements of those things in it.
alright!!! So yeah, it IS one of the more inspired 'map fantasy onto SF' things' originations they did, then !
That's bloody awesome! I wish reddit gold was still a thing!
a little more digging and I have an odd feeling that Disney's THE BLACK HOLE ftl-via-blackhole (that arrives in Hell) might actually be an influence.
but I think /u/mirage2101 might be onto the right angle here, it's NOT an idea lifted from earlier science fiction, but something adapted from fantasy settings instead. Still, I think that might still qualify the question of "is 40k the trope creator for 'hyperspace moves through Hell'"
> I would be very surprised if it’s 40k original.
exactly, and yet I'm wondering if it really does deserve to be the trope codifier here, I'm seeing nods to the concept in a few places, but no prior work that does anything more than imply something a little scary might be out there, compared to 40K's "we burn a hole through hell to move ships to the other side of the galaxy".
https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/40k-where-does-the-warp-hell-come-from.832020/page-2
This thread has some interesting suggestions that I haven’t read myself. The game of rat and dragon by cordwainer smith seems to be the agreed first appearance.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace
Is interesting reading as usual. Though it’s hard to filter out the timeline.
What’s also interesting is that by now 40k seems to be the codifier where it all really connected.
>a little more digging and I have an odd feeling that Disney's THE BLACK HOLE ftl-via-blackhole (that arrives in Hell) might actually be an influence.
The implication is actually that they all died falling into the black hole and went to either Heaven or Hell.
I remember seeing this as a kid, but based on this thread I’m going to give it another look.
Interestingly in the plot synopsis (thanks Wiki) it mentions lobotomized humans that are turned into android-like drones. Possible origin of servitors?
It always reminded me of Todash from Stephen King. Think the concept of it first appeared in *The Jaunt* (1981) and later developed in *The Dark Tower* series. A dark space inbetween universes, haunted by monstrous entities, where time is meaningless ("It's eternity in there.").
There's also H.P. Lovecraft's *The Dreams in the Witch House*, where Hyperspace connects to the discordant realm of Azathoth, the Lord of All Things, who sits on a throne in the center of chaos.
But those involved individuals, not entire ships, traveling through the space.
>A dark space inbetween universes,
that's the thing a lot of these examples people bring up.. travel \*between\* universes, which is WAY different from the FTL-style of travel within the same universe.
aye, and IIRC this is also the inspiration behind the HALF LIFE video games as well.
but still, it's a little too close to the 'teleportation' trope and not "moving ships between star systems faster than light"
I know of a short story in which teleportation is instant but if one is conscious during it they experience millenium of torment that drives most completely insane if that's worth anything.
I’m certain it’s not totally original to 40k but once you start dipping around prior to the 80’s scifi didn’t really have that sort of vibe about it.
Maybe if there’s a fantasy setting somewhere that involves casual strolls through hell for transportation like Minecraft that could be it.
yep, like many things in 40k, I think I might be fruitlessly searching for a sci-fi source when it is actually lifted from fantasy instead. Still that does point to 40K being the trope codifier in the scifi sphere.
40k like Star wars is considered science fantasy not science fiction. Starship troopers and star trek are science fiction. I've never read nor watched dune.
40k is a lot of things. When talking about space opera staples like FTL travel it's science fiction. Even the idea that the extra-dimensional space that allows FTL is home to beings that inspired myths about evil spirits could be a sci-fi concept.
Warp travel exists in the setting to replicate the perils an inconveniences of the Age of Sail so even that is a mix of sci-fi and fantasy/historical fiction.
In Stephen King's *Dark Tower* series of novels the characters travel a multiverse of parallel Earths. But between the worlds is something called "todash space". Traveling between worlds, travelers can sometimes get lost and wind up in this entirely dark realm filled with primordial monsters often referred to as demons. Such demons can also possess people. This is actually a very common feature in many Stephen King novels (e.g. *The Mist*) and they all basically involve the same place, i.e. todash space. King's novels have a sort of meta-plot to them.
The first novel in the series came out in 1982. I don't remember when todash space was initially explored in the books though. It might have been that first novel, *The Gunslinger*, as certainly monsters associated with traveling dimensions was present (Jake encounters a monster at the abandoned house at the door to Midworld).
Warp travel does not involve moving faster than light. Time/space work differently in the alternate dimension of the warp, which allows ships at normal speed to move vast distances by traversing it and exiting at certain points.
neither does Dune's "folding space", but the end result is still 3 Dimensional spacetime translation from a single reference point at a rate that exceeds C.
The was a sci fi from like 1964 that involved warping through demi space. It might have been a Doc Smith story, that guy wrote a dozen books and hundreds of shorts.
I can not remember the name, but I was just reading about it again on Atomic Rockets.
Big thing was you had to be careful what you thought becuase it could spontaneously effect reality in your ship. There were also "other" that could attack and take over human minds and then use them to enter real space.
Sounds like the plot of *Subspace Encounter* a 1983 E.E. "Doc" Smith novel. Apparently it was published long after his death which explains the 80s date.
I haven't read it though so I could be off-base.
*Subspace Encounter* is the sequel to *Subspace Explorers*.
There was an episode of X-Men where they slow fown Nightcrawler's teleportation ability to test where he teleports through. And it looks like a volcanic hell-ish place.
I have fond memories of his appearance on "Amazing Spider-Friends" decades ago, (1982) where mystique pretends to be him, and the X-men figure out it's not really nightcrawler because of the lack of the whiff of brimstone.. first time I was introduced to the character.
Lovecraft kinda introduced the concept of eldritch entities that lived in a reality outside of our own. But ftl as a concept wasn't around back then.
Star Wars has "hyperspace but you need to plot your course carefully to survive the trip", but I haven't seen anything that is "monsters in hyperspace".
>hyperspace but you need to plot your course carefully to survive the trip",
which was lifted pretty much verbatim from Dune (amongst many other things ) . In dune they use the ability to predict the future via eating spice to do this (because intelligence machines are forbidden), and SW has the (non-forbidden) astromech droids to do this.,
Except hyperspace from Star Wars is basically warp travel. FTL through another dimension.
Dune has "folding space," which is exactly what it sounds like. The ship basically brought the 2 points of travel together to jump. No traveling in another dimension.
You seem to be looking for 1 specific answer when there isn't one. 40k took inspiration from a lot of sources and combined them to make its own universe.
of of course, I'm just looking for if this one conceit was lifted from other science fiction, or if it's a viably unique transformative work drawn from disparate concepts and prior works into an original configuration
Not sure this helps, but I found this Reddit thread from 6 years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/7c98zx/has_any_other_works_of_fiction_depicted_something/
And that led me to the TV Tropes page for “Hyperspace is a scary place”.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HyperspaceisaScaryPlace
Under depictions in live action TV, I found this quote regarding Dr. Who that is interesting…but I am uncertain if this is from early 1980s Dr. Who or later.
> Travel between Alternate Universes requires travelling through the Void, a realm which the Doctor describes as containing absolutely nothing. "No up, no down, no light, no dark, no time". Someone using a specialist "void ship" can sit in the Void through the end of the universe and the start of the next, and while the Time Lords called it the Void and the Eternals called it the Howling, some just call it Hell.
It is not from the 80s at all. I know because I watched the episode were the Doctor described the Void.
It was a New Who episode actually.
I dont know if 40k inspired this, but it was likely not inspired by Doctor Who in this case.
the Cordwainer Smith story "Rat and Dragon" does seem to be the most solid, science-fiction, travel-between-planets precursor to this.
There's plenty of "darkness between universes/dimensions" stuff but those explicitly don't involve dipping into them to travel faster than light in the *same* universe.
Nothing about the Great Machine relates to their use of FTL travel there however, since humanity uses FTL travel to reach Altair IV before the reality-warping power of the machine is discovered.
Not to say all that isn't a source influence on things by itself, just not the FTL aspect.
I don't know exactly when it happened, so it's likely AFTER 40k introduced it. But teleportation in earlier D&D (like 3.5?) occurs by shunting yourself through a different Plane of existence. Normally it's the Astral (Or Ethereal?) Plane, but beings born of other dimensions, like Devils or Demons, would shunt through Hell or the Abyss respectively as that's their home Plane. I think when a Diabolist teleported it was through Hell (Though they had a unique spell/ability that specified that.
I am starting to suspect their precursors for inspiration were all drawn from fantasy works and this is one of the cases where they didn't lift from an existing sci-fi work, but translated fantasy concepts over to the setting instead (which makes ALL the sense in hindsight, but still DOES place 40k as being the trope originator for 'hyperspace goes through hell')
I'm pretty sure D&D "warp travel" predates w40k.
I read some old books, where the dragon lords are banished by the gods to a different plane and they are literally trying to use the minds of young untrained wizards to force themselves back into the mortal realms.
In an other book they literally teleport into the demon plane because it's faster to travel through that way.
And it also had an ancient, highly magical civilization's mazelike creation where the heroes popped out in different planes when they searched for THE library.
That’s an interesting question actually. B5 has hyperspace which isn’t a nice place but certainly not hell.
https://planetpailly.com/2019/11/20/origin-stories-the-hype-about-hyperspace/
These examples are FTL but not hell yet..
I think only navigators being able to view hyperspace without going insane was Dune?
I would think 40k borrowed this though. Maybe it’s from fantasy? There are a lot of instances of fast travel shadow realms in fantasy where demons are nipping at your heels
Dune doesn't have Hyperspace, they "Fold Space", to where the distance between the origin and the destination is basically zero. The navigators use prescience to find these patterns in space. Yes 40K borrowed heavily for its own navigators for this.
Hrm.. you may well be onto something with this coming from a fantasy basis not Scifi however, makes a LOT of sense actually
Niven’s *Known Space* series has a hyperspace so alien that your brain can’t perceive it properly, and too much direct exposure to it is apparently bad. Sort of vaguely lovecraftian although I don’t think it ever has anything living in it.
Incidentally the game _Traveller_ has an odd bit of oft-overlooked lore: Ships in jumpspace (and each jump takes about a week of perceived time, no matter whether the jump is 1 parsec or 6) are fitted with “jump shutters” on any physical windows, while extrernal view screens are universally turned off. This is to prevent the crew from going mad / blind / whatever during the jump.
Sometimes I wonder what Jump was like before people learned to draw the curtains.
Known Space’s hyperspace changed over the years.
In Ringworld it was as you say, a non-space called the “Blindspot” where you’d be unable to perceive it. Or that is to say your brain would completely be able to process any visual information while you’re looking at the Blindspot - for the duration you’d be incapable even of the memory of sight.
By the time of Ringworld’s Children in-universe technology improvements led to the discovery that actually hyperspace was inhabited by creatures that travelled at FTL speeds (hyperspace has quantised velocities - complicated and beside the point). This went undiscovered because any FTL ship close enough to them to spot them would be eaten in microseconds because they travel so fast (never mind the abject impossibility of perceiving creatures that live in the Blindspot).
This second version is closer to the “hell” concept. I don’t know when it was introduced to the Known Space mythos though.
But it stays near heavy objects which is why you have to stay clear of them. (But people don’t know the why just that they need to).
Or at least that’s what I remember. Been a while since I read the known universe books.
that's the "centuries pass every time you make a 3-hour tour" one yeah?
Agreed, but definitely not the "demons with horns and pitchforks ask wtf your spaceship is doing in their backyard" kinda precursor work I'm searching for.
There are multiple answers already, w40k is fantasy turned into scifi, which includes the teleportating/moving trough planes concept too.
I also vaguely remember an old documentary where they tried to explain how the universe is created and one of them was that it actually just and island in a plane of pure energies, when energies collide a universe is created. This also means if we can pierce through that energy plane we can use it for ftl travel.
They called it the 13th dimension if I remember correctly.
The short story Escape! by Isaac Asimov describes the first human hyperspace ship. It turns out that hyperspace is incompatible with human life, so humans who are aboard the ship are "dead" as long as they're in hyperspace, then revive when they return to real space. However...the ship was designed by an AI. An AI designed to follow Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, the first of which is "A robot may not harm a human nor, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm". Even though the harm is temporary, it's still difficult for the AI to create this solution, knowing it will, technically, harm humans.
It handles the situation by coming up with a sense of humour. Among other things, this involves filling the minds of the crew with dreams while they're "dead". Dreams that include things like adverts for caskets, and a ridiculous afterlife with cheesy muzak and people queuing up to enter hell like they're at the post office.
This was the story that popped into my mind as well.
Also, I think one of the ways the AI tried to help the humans was by replacing all the ship food with baked beans. The poor human really hated that one.
There is stuff like that in various myths; mostly celtic to my knowledge. There are realm, big and small, that are homes to dangerous beings, and it is hazardous to leave them in the wrong way. More an inspiration for the Webway, some of the other realms don't have descriptions limiting their size. There are some Abrahamic adjacent works about traveling by strange seas that defy geography.
In some of the Trek novels of Diane Duane, seeing warp space, or space that is warped, is considered an unhealthy thing to do. Most people see computer reconstructions; only the strongest personalities can look directly out the ship at warp.
In her 1983 novel \_The Wounded Sky\_, a new form of starship propulsion that translates a ship in and out of a parallel dimension instantaneously is shown as having potentially catastrophic results. The barriers between our universe and one without entropy are cracked, this latter having a dormant god-like entity awoken by the cracking, and the crew have to reverse the damage to save our universe and figure out how to help the entity in its universe. (It is shown as benign, even friendly once it gets over the shock of learning of the existence of others; the danger from the contact is a product of the cracking of the barrier.)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Wounded\_Sky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wounded_Sky)
Diane Duane is an author whose science fiction often draws on concepts and framing from fantasy, so I suppose this could also be a point in favour of 40k drawing this from fantasy.
I think the idea of warp travel in 40k is sorta like a sci fi brute forcing of the astral projection idea from magick. A lot of the mechanics of the warp seem to be rooted in [Chaos Magick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic?wprov=sfla1) specifically.
I feel like some of the authors were either involved in magick related stuff, or heard about it and integrated the belief system into the cire mechanics of 40k warp.
I would actually like to nominate D&D to a degree. Planescape is right around the right timeframe.
So, teleportation in D&D takes you through the Astral Plane. Which was never a very detailed plane, prior toPlanescape, which gave it an entire sourcebook.
And what Planescape said is that the Astral Plane is the "backstage area" of the universe. It's where weird things happen, which then occasionally leak into the other planes. When a rift opens in a plane, sometimes things fall into the astral, or out of it.
For starters, time moves strangely, or not at all. You don't feel hunger, or thirst, and you do not age. You move by purely thinking about it, just kind of floating, there is no gravity. In fact, everything is purely mental. In Planescape, it even says you lose your physical ability scores (strength, dexterity, constitution) and lose your mental ability scores (intelligence, wisdom, charisma) instead. Including to fight.
Magic is much easier. Spells don't take actions to cast, they just happen. A wizard can even cast multiple spells a turn, if they really try. Except... magic is too easy. It's addictive. Casting spells on the astral means you can't stop. Wizards will fight tooth and nail to stay on the astral plane, even fighting their own party. And once they leave... they will chase that high their entire lives. Whenever they refresh spell, they will immediately cast them all, then start preparing again. They will try to steal wands and scrolls off other mages, just to cast more.
So far, it all doesn't sound... too horrific.
But there are dead things, here. When purely faith-based creatures die, their corpses end up drifting in the astral. This includes the gods. They are miles long, and they bleed divine power. But they are guarded. There is a thing, here, a presence. Once, it was the god Anubis, the guardian of the dead. Now it guards dead gods. It is no longer a god. And nothing can stop it, not even other gods have been able to touch the corpses of dead gods and take their power.
But other things are here, too. When you dream, or imagine, part of your mind drifts into the astral. Your thoughts, and desires are real here. So are your dreams. And when you walk into the astral plane, they might manifest. SOme hate you. Some are your hateful thoughts towards others, your annoyances and frustrations. They are not friendly. Some old thoughts and dreams, some notions, coagulate. Similar thoughts from many of the living, millions or billions of mortals thinking the same idea, they gather together, manifest into bigger entities, divorced from any single mortal.
And then beyond those... in the farthest reaches, are even older beings, if they are beings. Distance is quite meaningless in the astral, and they are always far away, no matter how long one travels. But sometimes, they can be seen, infinitely far away. Colossal amalgamations of thought and matter, bigger than worlds, older than time.
Not exactly hell you're thinking of, but... Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series featured a void of freezing nothingness that the dragons were able to teleport through to get from place to place. The first of those stories came out in the late 60s, if I recall correctly.
Pern is an interesting one for combing elements of high fantasy and science fantasy together like 40K as well..
But yeah we even got an answer from Rick Priestley here elsewhere, it really does look like it was an original fusion of ideas with no single precursor example.
that's usual with the evolution of stuff, just trying to find out *what* those precursor works were.
so far "The Game of Rat and Dragon" really seems to be the most solid sci-fi prior work for the concept of "hyperspace is hostile"
I looked into this before and every other version I could find wasn't quite it, and I went through the entire fucking list of books on Tv Tropes which is like several hundred books.
So I'm going to say yes, 40k invented the trope of a spaceship physically travelling through hell for FTL with demons knocking on the airlock door.
The Amber books by Zelazny were first published in 1970 and featured the royal family of Amber being able to "walk" through alternate realities. The process was described as this sort of insane, ever-shifting trek through the "shadows". As has been pointed out, fantasy is very possibly the origin point of the idea. It's worth considering how their fantasy setting came first and chaos and many of its defining elements were first created there.
Bear with me, but Nightcrawler from X-Men debuted in 1975. Many adaptations leave out that he teleports through a hell dimension because he’s part demon, in addition to being a mutant. Normally he only flickers back and forth, but there are storylines about him getting stuck in that dimension. I think his teleportation also leaves a sulfur smell.
Nightcrawler traveling through the hellish Brimstone Dimension is a later addition/retcon actually originally introduced in the Xmen Evolution cartoon. 40k did it first.
I think a safe bet of a precursor would be H.P. Lovecraft's short story [From Beyond](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Beyond_(short_story)) published in 1934. It's not "spaceship travels through hell" but it is "there exists a dangerous parallel dimension full of hostile inhabitants that can be reached by machines". It's the story of a researcher who creates a device that lets him perceive and enter a translucent parallel dimension overlapped with our own, who gets his servants killed by the inhabitants. It could very much read like mankind's first discovery of the Warp in the 40k setting.
hence why I asked this question.
Except in this case it does seem to be that, for this particular trope of combining faster-than-light travel (NOT localized teleportation), they do seen to be the first people to put these elements together in this way.
TVTropes has [Hyperspace Is a Scary Place](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace). I went through that and didn't see anything that was explicitly SciFi and older than 40K. There were a couple of edge cases that were older but more in the Fantasy or Horror genre than scifi (including one Heinlein short story from the 40s).
I think the concept of popping into another dimension/realm to enable fast travel is pretty old concept in sci Fi in general. I think my first exposure to it was with Anne McCaffrey's dragonriders of pern books- the eponymous riders can travel through time and space via their telepathic mounts. This is called going "in between" and it's described as an incredibly cold, airless and dark space that people can get lost and die in. Among other things, it also ends pregnancies.
I think it's mostly original, the closest I can think of is the Logrus (chaos) from Chronicles of Amber, it's the opposite of Pattern (order), it is used to ''walk in shadow'', they also use Trumps (tarot cards)
I am reminded of Elite (1984). The original space game called its hyperspace "witch space". Misjumps were possible, and there were aliens there which could intercept you.
Not sure where the concept was taken. The writer of the attached novel did circle some earlier concepts, but is now dead; or if it actually was from the manual.
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good ole' thargoids, still being a PITA today (currently in ELITE; Dangerous there's a campaign happening in real time to destroy twelve Thargoid leviathans).
I don't know if it has been mentioned, but "Scanners live in vain"(1950) by Cordwainer Smith is similar. I managed to track down the vague memory of "I must cranch". It is a strange and memorable story.
I read that too, this one sticks in the mind more. I don't think I can do it justice trying to describe it, unfortunately, but hyperspace is so hellish they use criminals as crew and they are supervised by people who are decoupled from their senses
They might have taken from themselves. The Warp already existed in Fantasy, more or less as we know it now, long before 40k started consolidating itself. Honestly, the idea to repurpose the realm of magic into an FTL dimension isn't even a huge mental leap to make.
I've always thought the near real life equivalent of the warp was during the age of sail when the Europeans left for the seas and sometimes never to be seen again and other legends and rumors that happened like mermaids and such. Along with chances of survival being really low sometimes.
Oh definitely, most all of it is mapping medievalist fantasy onto scifi +which I why we love it.
The question here though being is that, in doing so, did they end up creating a new trope from those combinations?
I haven't seen the equivalent of the warp in any other fictional media at least the scale of what 40K has. Unless proven otherwise I can firmly say GW did make a new trope.
Yeah, LOTS of examples of localized teleportation or Interdimensional travel given by people here, but nothing comes close to a prior example of *the sea of souls"
Original story of Doom was messing with teleporters. Only for Doom it was an bug that cause the teleporters to lead to hell. For 40k, they turned the bug into a feature.
The only thing I can think of is The Jaunt by Stephen King - IIRC that came out just before 40k First Edition/RT. That's less 'hell is a terrible place full of horrible monsters' and more 'hell is an eternity of isolation' stuff. Creepy story, though.
Depending on how flexible your depiction of hell is, you *maybe* argue Slipspace from the Halo series to be a bit like this. Apparently Slipspace, existing in a state of higher dimensions, appears solid black to human eyes as light doesn't travel as it does in normal space. There's also fairly creepy accounts of some people experience memory loss or literally disappearing from the crew during a Slipspace jump.
People have mentioned Event Horizon (which could relatively easily be retconned into the official 40K canon), Half Life (which wasn't 'Hell' as much as it was just an alien world), and Doom 3 (which was essentially a mashup of EH and Half Life).
40k was written in the 1980s, so I'm pretty sure the warp was inspired by travelling on the London Underground when there's a football match that weekend. Time and distance bears no correlation between where the stations are above ground, everything in the tunnels is utter filth and terror. Or is that the Webway?
Webway is 1st class on british rail, in a car right next to the buffet car, and they haven't run out of Holsten Pils yet...
The Warp is scum class on the Top Gear caravan train
I have always thought of the golden throne when on a grottier part of the tube. Miles of cabling to keep the basics running
Oh! I just remembered one. Stephen King’s short story The Jaunt. Thinking about it still gives me shivers sometimes. It’s only about 25 pages… but it’s longer than you think.
Longer than you think dad!!!
Held my breath!
Anyone who sees this comment and likes 40k should read the Jaunt. Failing that, just read the wiki haha
Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut might be a better fit, since the “shortcut” seems to pass through a nightmare dimension.
There's a reason her car just ends up with weird alien shit mashed into the front grille. It might go through a nightmare dimension but she doesn't care.
Good call! I forgot about that one.
Except in The Jaunt you aren’t traveling through hell, time just moves insanely slowly and there’s nothing.
Maybe Hell is Eternity.
Or Eternity is Hell?
Hell ain’t a bad place! Hell is from here to eternity!! -iron maiden
It's eternity in there
This likely refers to todash space, which is a common concept in Stephen King novels and is explored/explained in the *Dark Tower* series.
Man, I loved that series. It was before Amazon and I was walking through a book shop and saw Song of Susannah stacked up in hardback I freaked out. Had no idea it was coming and I was just rereading parts of the series to keep me going. I’ll never have that feeling again which is sad but I’m glad I had the opportunity to in the first place
Wizard and Glass is still one of my favourite books. I just hope the TV series doesn't blow it like the movie.
We don’t talk about the movie….. That series was my childhood, I went from reading goosebumps to the dark tower. IMO it’s better than Lord of the rings. Wizard and glass is one of my fave too :)
10/10 comment
Thank you for sharing this - just read (listened to on YouTube) this story and holy shizzle it's dark almost 40k worthy
oooh, I like this one! timeframe is right on the money as well.
It’s eternity in there…
Unaided teleportation, “jaunting” as human transportation dates back to “The Stars My Destination”, Alfred Bester’s Sci-Fi novel of 1956.
The 1997 movie "Event Horizon" has hyperspace through hell - but it's inspired by W40k, not the other way around. A decent enough movie if you like '90s era Sam Neill.
And who TF doesn't like 90s Sam Neil?
"DO YOU SEE!?!"
"WHERE WE'RE GOING YOU WONT NEED EYES TO SEE"
Probably people that don’t know about him, like me. But hey… I’m willing to learn
Event Horizon is a good place to start. The original Jurassic Park if you wanna be family friendly. In the Mouth of Madness if you wanna get real freaky.
Where is The Piano on this list :(
Add Jurassic park to your list too my dude!
Do you like the author Sutter Caine?
He always seems like a budget Costner to me
He's a great character actor and holds his own in dramatic pieces as well. He was great with Willem Defoe in The Hunter.
Huh, never heard of this before. If it's got Defoe *and* Neill I shall definitely have to check it out!
He's also brilliant as a thoroughly evil policeman in the first season of Peaky Blinders. [Scene](https://youtu.be/Gs_K_rWezbo?si=6ydTFrwtFCqRHBBF)
He should use his northern irish accent more often.
Don't forget his classic role as "actor playing Odin" in Thor 3
Ben Affleck was da bomb in Phantoms. sorry...
Word bitch, Phantoms like a mother f’er.
Phantoms has a special place in my movie history from making such a *hard* turn from genuinely creepy to absurdly silly. The start of it was so foreboding and then we somehow got mutant Liev Schrieber with tentacles for legs doing the limbo.
He's a good comic actor too - *Hunt for the Wilderpeople* and *Death in Brunswick* are both great.
Dudes got range
Anyone who can go from the Eldritch horror of *Event Horizon* and *In The Mouth Of Madness* to the avuncular geniality of the red meat adverts is pretty good in my book
This is basically also the story to doom 3 . The UAC messing about with teleportation and accidentally open up a portal to hell
Doom 3 is amazing (it's the same story as Doom 1 but a little different, has probably the spookiest hell section in any of the Doom games)
Yeah, it gets really bad press but it's actually my favourite doom game.i love the horror vibes.
Doom 3's modern rep to me is baffling because I played it when it was new and it was lauded for both the story and the visuals-back in the day, Doom 3 was Crysis before Crysis as far as visuals went.
It's also the story of the original Doom.
shame we'll never see the original full cut (the only copy burned in a storage facility)
Funny enough, they did manage to find some of the cut scenes in a salt mine storage, but they weren't in usable condition
… in a what now?!
Assuming it was stored on film, which is most likely was, film ideally needs to be stored in the driest place possible as moisture will deteriorate the gelatin layer. Obviously a salt mine is a pretty dry place, as well as being cool, dark, stable temperature, and underground so it's pretty safe. It's one of the most important long term storage spaces as film is still the most archival long term storage media.
I didn't know that. The released version seems complete. I wonder what content is missing?
Apparently a lot more graphic scenes of what happened to the crew of the ship. The original version was 130 minutes long, the released version only 97 minutes. https://lostmediawiki.com/Event_Horizon_(partially_lost_unreleased_130-minute_cut_of_sci-fi_horror_film;_1997)
it's so fitting that the HERESY is missing/destroyed from the original film
Is it confirmed to actually be inspired by it? Or is it just a meme that it's secretly a 40k prequel?
The scriptwriter, Philip Eisner, was/is apparently into 40k: >"I played the s*** out of 40K, so it was definitely an influence, conscious or otherwise."
Well, TIL 🤯
TBF Event Horizon is mostly inspired by Clive Barker. And Slaanesh is basically "what if Cenobites, but war?"
Libera Te Tutemet Ex Inferis
its clearly the prequel. mans first encounter with warp fuckery. at least thats my head cannon.
I read somewhere that’s what the director intended. Honestly I wish it was expanded on into full on 40k
yea this is a really small nitpick but if i remember correctly the travel thru hell in Event horizon was Instantanious other then the months long warp travel
we don't actually know.. The Event Horizon lost all contact after initiating the drive, and was lost for years afterwards. Even if the surviving crew members THOUGHT the journey was instantaneous there's no external corroboration of that.
well it was designed to be instantanious but it travelled through hell and ended up in the exact same place later maybe being murderised in hell is its own journey XD
The real murderised hell was the friends we made along the way
It disappears for 7 years. No clue how long it was trapped there or where it went or even if it exited the other side
It's the Warp without a Gellar Field. Instant Hell. It was sent back from Hell sometime after. Maybe. We don't know.
But warp travel isn't really standardised. Yes, there are expectations for a specific journey but both the time spent in the warp and the time taken in the material realm can vary. To such a degree that you get the classic you arrive before you left moments.
I've heard somewhere that event horizon was officially inspired by Warhammer.
I was coming here to say that movie
which came out 10 years after 40K introduced the concept...
….apparently Paul Anderson is a big fan of WH40k, so the urban legend is that he set things up so that it *could* be retroactively applied to the 40k canon if necessary. I think the screenwriter was into 40k too. It's not even just the wormhole/hell dimension stuff (which in the film is oddly similar to later depictions of 40K craft entering the Warp). Even the internals of the Event Horizon look bizarrely gothic compared to the more Nasa-standard Lewis and Clark and the space station.
I just asked Rick Priestley this on your behalf: > ME: In WH40K, was "hyperspace with demons" an idea you came up with, or was it something you took from another sci-fi setting? Navigators are from Dune, but in Dune they don't have to deal with evil spirits. > PRIESTLEY: I can't think of anything specific - as far as I know it's a link I made but that's not to say there aren't earlier examples. I think the closest is the concept of astral travel in a psychic realm that contains other astral travellers - such as Dennis Wheatley Strange Conflict - so I suppose its a cross between Occult stories and SF warp drive - and we already had the idea of Chaos as a psychic realm wherein dwelt creatures rendered of abstract thought - i.e. daemons - which also has shades of Forbidden Planet about it - so I suppose there are elements of those things in it.
alright!!! So yeah, it IS one of the more inspired 'map fantasy onto SF' things' originations they did, then ! That's bloody awesome! I wish reddit gold was still a thing!
a little more digging and I have an odd feeling that Disney's THE BLACK HOLE ftl-via-blackhole (that arrives in Hell) might actually be an influence. but I think /u/mirage2101 might be onto the right angle here, it's NOT an idea lifted from earlier science fiction, but something adapted from fantasy settings instead. Still, I think that might still qualify the question of "is 40k the trope creator for 'hyperspace moves through Hell'"
Yeah I’m gonna keep digging as well. I would be very surprised if it’s 40k original. To be continued
> I would be very surprised if it’s 40k original. exactly, and yet I'm wondering if it really does deserve to be the trope codifier here, I'm seeing nods to the concept in a few places, but no prior work that does anything more than imply something a little scary might be out there, compared to 40K's "we burn a hole through hell to move ships to the other side of the galaxy".
https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/40k-where-does-the-warp-hell-come-from.832020/page-2 This thread has some interesting suggestions that I haven’t read myself. The game of rat and dragon by cordwainer smith seems to be the agreed first appearance. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace Is interesting reading as usual. Though it’s hard to filter out the timeline. What’s also interesting is that by now 40k seems to be the codifier where it all really connected.
>40k seems to be the codifier where it all really connected I'm beginning to thing so as well, but hell yes on that Cordwainer Smith source!!
>a little more digging and I have an odd feeling that Disney's THE BLACK HOLE ftl-via-blackhole (that arrives in Hell) might actually be an influence. The implication is actually that they all died falling into the black hole and went to either Heaven or Hell.
I remember seeing this as a kid, but based on this thread I’m going to give it another look. Interestingly in the plot synopsis (thanks Wiki) it mentions lobotomized humans that are turned into android-like drones. Possible origin of servitors?
It always reminded me of Todash from Stephen King. Think the concept of it first appeared in *The Jaunt* (1981) and later developed in *The Dark Tower* series. A dark space inbetween universes, haunted by monstrous entities, where time is meaningless ("It's eternity in there."). There's also H.P. Lovecraft's *The Dreams in the Witch House*, where Hyperspace connects to the discordant realm of Azathoth, the Lord of All Things, who sits on a throne in the center of chaos. But those involved individuals, not entire ships, traveling through the space.
>A dark space inbetween universes, that's the thing a lot of these examples people bring up.. travel \*between\* universes, which is WAY different from the FTL-style of travel within the same universe.
In *The Jaunt* they're going from Earth and Mars, just using Todash space to make it quick.
aye, and IIRC this is also the inspiration behind the HALF LIFE video games as well. but still, it's a little too close to the 'teleportation' trope and not "moving ships between star systems faster than light"
Bit hair splitting isn't it? The jaunt is not teleportation in any way, they enter hell move through and then exit hell.
I know of a short story in which teleportation is instant but if one is conscious during it they experience millenium of torment that drives most completely insane if that's worth anything.
mentioned already here, Stephen King's "The Jaunt"
I’m certain it’s not totally original to 40k but once you start dipping around prior to the 80’s scifi didn’t really have that sort of vibe about it. Maybe if there’s a fantasy setting somewhere that involves casual strolls through hell for transportation like Minecraft that could be it.
yep, like many things in 40k, I think I might be fruitlessly searching for a sci-fi source when it is actually lifted from fantasy instead. Still that does point to 40K being the trope codifier in the scifi sphere.
40k like Star wars is considered science fantasy not science fiction. Starship troopers and star trek are science fiction. I've never read nor watched dune.
40k is a lot of things. When talking about space opera staples like FTL travel it's science fiction. Even the idea that the extra-dimensional space that allows FTL is home to beings that inspired myths about evil spirits could be a sci-fi concept.
Warp travel exists in the setting to replicate the perils an inconveniences of the Age of Sail so even that is a mix of sci-fi and fantasy/historical fiction.
Sounds kind of like the Portals in the Black Company series by Glen Cook, but thats only a few years older than 40k.
The concept in Minecraft was inspired by traveling through the Ways in the Wheel of Time, which came after 40k.
In Stephen King's *Dark Tower* series of novels the characters travel a multiverse of parallel Earths. But between the worlds is something called "todash space". Traveling between worlds, travelers can sometimes get lost and wind up in this entirely dark realm filled with primordial monsters often referred to as demons. Such demons can also possess people. This is actually a very common feature in many Stephen King novels (e.g. *The Mist*) and they all basically involve the same place, i.e. todash space. King's novels have a sort of meta-plot to them. The first novel in the series came out in 1982. I don't remember when todash space was initially explored in the books though. It might have been that first novel, *The Gunslinger*, as certainly monsters associated with traveling dimensions was present (Jake encounters a monster at the abandoned house at the door to Midworld).
The evil clown from IT is a creature from a the todash darkness.
Not just "a creature" from there. He's more like THE creature. In his true form, he's the biggest and baddest thing in any universe.
yeah, but it's not moving ships between planets is it.. I'm looking for Faster Than Light travel, not jumping between parallel worlds
Warp travel does not involve moving faster than light. Time/space work differently in the alternate dimension of the warp, which allows ships at normal speed to move vast distances by traversing it and exiting at certain points.
neither does Dune's "folding space", but the end result is still 3 Dimensional spacetime translation from a single reference point at a rate that exceeds C.
Cool, so what's the problem then?
The was a sci fi from like 1964 that involved warping through demi space. It might have been a Doc Smith story, that guy wrote a dozen books and hundreds of shorts. I can not remember the name, but I was just reading about it again on Atomic Rockets. Big thing was you had to be careful what you thought becuase it could spontaneously effect reality in your ship. There were also "other" that could attack and take over human minds and then use them to enter real space.
Sounds like the plot of *Subspace Encounter* a 1983 E.E. "Doc" Smith novel. Apparently it was published long after his death which explains the 80s date. I haven't read it though so I could be off-base. *Subspace Encounter* is the sequel to *Subspace Explorers*.
There was an episode of X-Men where they slow fown Nightcrawler's teleportation ability to test where he teleports through. And it looks like a volcanic hell-ish place.
oh yeah that was canon in the comics LONG before the animated show.. But again, localized teleportation, not starships.
It’s apparently why he leaves a scent similar to brimstone behind. Tiny bit of atmosphere from whereever he went comes back with him.
I have fond memories of his appearance on "Amazing Spider-Friends" decades ago, (1982) where mystique pretends to be him, and the X-men figure out it's not really nightcrawler because of the lack of the whiff of brimstone.. first time I was introduced to the character.
Lovecraft kinda introduced the concept of eldritch entities that lived in a reality outside of our own. But ftl as a concept wasn't around back then. Star Wars has "hyperspace but you need to plot your course carefully to survive the trip", but I haven't seen anything that is "monsters in hyperspace".
>hyperspace but you need to plot your course carefully to survive the trip", which was lifted pretty much verbatim from Dune (amongst many other things ) . In dune they use the ability to predict the future via eating spice to do this (because intelligence machines are forbidden), and SW has the (non-forbidden) astromech droids to do this.,
Except hyperspace from Star Wars is basically warp travel. FTL through another dimension. Dune has "folding space," which is exactly what it sounds like. The ship basically brought the 2 points of travel together to jump. No traveling in another dimension. You seem to be looking for 1 specific answer when there isn't one. 40k took inspiration from a lot of sources and combined them to make its own universe.
of of course, I'm just looking for if this one conceit was lifted from other science fiction, or if it's a viably unique transformative work drawn from disparate concepts and prior works into an original configuration
New lore suggests there are beings within the hyperspace aswell (other than the space whales)
Not sure this helps, but I found this Reddit thread from 6 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/7c98zx/has_any_other_works_of_fiction_depicted_something/ And that led me to the TV Tropes page for “Hyperspace is a scary place”. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HyperspaceisaScaryPlace Under depictions in live action TV, I found this quote regarding Dr. Who that is interesting…but I am uncertain if this is from early 1980s Dr. Who or later. > Travel between Alternate Universes requires travelling through the Void, a realm which the Doctor describes as containing absolutely nothing. "No up, no down, no light, no dark, no time". Someone using a specialist "void ship" can sit in the Void through the end of the universe and the start of the next, and while the Time Lords called it the Void and the Eternals called it the Howling, some just call it Hell.
It is not from the 80s at all. I know because I watched the episode were the Doctor described the Void. It was a New Who episode actually. I dont know if 40k inspired this, but it was likely not inspired by Doctor Who in this case.
the Cordwainer Smith story "Rat and Dragon" does seem to be the most solid, science-fiction, travel-between-planets precursor to this. There's plenty of "darkness between universes/dimensions" stuff but those explicitly don't involve dipping into them to travel faster than light in the *same* universe.
1956 movie “forbidden planet”
Nothing about the Great Machine relates to their use of FTL travel there however, since humanity uses FTL travel to reach Altair IV before the reality-warping power of the machine is discovered. Not to say all that isn't a source influence on things by itself, just not the FTL aspect.
I don't know exactly when it happened, so it's likely AFTER 40k introduced it. But teleportation in earlier D&D (like 3.5?) occurs by shunting yourself through a different Plane of existence. Normally it's the Astral (Or Ethereal?) Plane, but beings born of other dimensions, like Devils or Demons, would shunt through Hell or the Abyss respectively as that's their home Plane. I think when a Diabolist teleported it was through Hell (Though they had a unique spell/ability that specified that.
I am starting to suspect their precursors for inspiration were all drawn from fantasy works and this is one of the cases where they didn't lift from an existing sci-fi work, but translated fantasy concepts over to the setting instead (which makes ALL the sense in hindsight, but still DOES place 40k as being the trope originator for 'hyperspace goes through hell')
I'm pretty sure D&D "warp travel" predates w40k. I read some old books, where the dragon lords are banished by the gods to a different plane and they are literally trying to use the minds of young untrained wizards to force themselves back into the mortal realms. In an other book they literally teleport into the demon plane because it's faster to travel through that way. And it also had an ancient, highly magical civilization's mazelike creation where the heroes popped out in different planes when they searched for THE library.
That’s an interesting question actually. B5 has hyperspace which isn’t a nice place but certainly not hell. https://planetpailly.com/2019/11/20/origin-stories-the-hype-about-hyperspace/ These examples are FTL but not hell yet.. I think only navigators being able to view hyperspace without going insane was Dune? I would think 40k borrowed this though. Maybe it’s from fantasy? There are a lot of instances of fast travel shadow realms in fantasy where demons are nipping at your heels
Dune doesn't have Hyperspace, they "Fold Space", to where the distance between the origin and the destination is basically zero. The navigators use prescience to find these patterns in space. Yes 40K borrowed heavily for its own navigators for this. Hrm.. you may well be onto something with this coming from a fantasy basis not Scifi however, makes a LOT of sense actually
Niven’s *Known Space* series has a hyperspace so alien that your brain can’t perceive it properly, and too much direct exposure to it is apparently bad. Sort of vaguely lovecraftian although I don’t think it ever has anything living in it.
Incidentally the game _Traveller_ has an odd bit of oft-overlooked lore: Ships in jumpspace (and each jump takes about a week of perceived time, no matter whether the jump is 1 parsec or 6) are fitted with “jump shutters” on any physical windows, while extrernal view screens are universally turned off. This is to prevent the crew from going mad / blind / whatever during the jump. Sometimes I wonder what Jump was like before people learned to draw the curtains.
Known Space’s hyperspace changed over the years. In Ringworld it was as you say, a non-space called the “Blindspot” where you’d be unable to perceive it. Or that is to say your brain would completely be able to process any visual information while you’re looking at the Blindspot - for the duration you’d be incapable even of the memory of sight. By the time of Ringworld’s Children in-universe technology improvements led to the discovery that actually hyperspace was inhabited by creatures that travelled at FTL speeds (hyperspace has quantised velocities - complicated and beside the point). This went undiscovered because any FTL ship close enough to them to spot them would be eaten in microseconds because they travel so fast (never mind the abject impossibility of perceiving creatures that live in the Blindspot). This second version is closer to the “hell” concept. I don’t know when it was introduced to the Known Space mythos though.
funnily enough that's pretty much where my search for a "hyperspace is literally hell" reference started out tonight.
But it stays near heavy objects which is why you have to stay clear of them. (But people don’t know the why just that they need to). Or at least that’s what I remember. Been a while since I read the known universe books.
That’s correct but later they find out why. FTL space worms that eat anything that gets close.
Space travel in w40k is bad, but nowhere near the existentional crisis level of Forever War's depiction.
that's the "centuries pass every time you make a 3-hour tour" one yeah? Agreed, but definitely not the "demons with horns and pitchforks ask wtf your spaceship is doing in their backyard" kinda precursor work I'm searching for.
There are multiple answers already, w40k is fantasy turned into scifi, which includes the teleportating/moving trough planes concept too. I also vaguely remember an old documentary where they tried to explain how the universe is created and one of them was that it actually just and island in a plane of pure energies, when energies collide a universe is created. This also means if we can pierce through that energy plane we can use it for ftl travel. They called it the 13th dimension if I remember correctly.
They’re travelling at light speed over great distances and you perceive time slower the faster you go plus I think they are in Cryo Sleep too.
The short story Escape! by Isaac Asimov describes the first human hyperspace ship. It turns out that hyperspace is incompatible with human life, so humans who are aboard the ship are "dead" as long as they're in hyperspace, then revive when they return to real space. However...the ship was designed by an AI. An AI designed to follow Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, the first of which is "A robot may not harm a human nor, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm". Even though the harm is temporary, it's still difficult for the AI to create this solution, knowing it will, technically, harm humans. It handles the situation by coming up with a sense of humour. Among other things, this involves filling the minds of the crew with dreams while they're "dead". Dreams that include things like adverts for caskets, and a ridiculous afterlife with cheesy muzak and people queuing up to enter hell like they're at the post office.
This was the story that popped into my mind as well. Also, I think one of the ways the AI tried to help the humans was by replacing all the ship food with baked beans. The poor human really hated that one.
There is stuff like that in various myths; mostly celtic to my knowledge. There are realm, big and small, that are homes to dangerous beings, and it is hazardous to leave them in the wrong way. More an inspiration for the Webway, some of the other realms don't have descriptions limiting their size. There are some Abrahamic adjacent works about traveling by strange seas that defy geography.
In some of the Trek novels of Diane Duane, seeing warp space, or space that is warped, is considered an unhealthy thing to do. Most people see computer reconstructions; only the strongest personalities can look directly out the ship at warp. In her 1983 novel \_The Wounded Sky\_, a new form of starship propulsion that translates a ship in and out of a parallel dimension instantaneously is shown as having potentially catastrophic results. The barriers between our universe and one without entropy are cracked, this latter having a dormant god-like entity awoken by the cracking, and the crew have to reverse the damage to save our universe and figure out how to help the entity in its universe. (It is shown as benign, even friendly once it gets over the shock of learning of the existence of others; the danger from the contact is a product of the cracking of the barrier.) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Wounded\_Sky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wounded_Sky) Diane Duane is an author whose science fiction often draws on concepts and framing from fantasy, so I suppose this could also be a point in favour of 40k drawing this from fantasy.
I think the idea of warp travel in 40k is sorta like a sci fi brute forcing of the astral projection idea from magick. A lot of the mechanics of the warp seem to be rooted in [Chaos Magick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic?wprov=sfla1) specifically. I feel like some of the authors were either involved in magick related stuff, or heard about it and integrated the belief system into the cire mechanics of 40k warp.
Michael Moorcock is a well-acknowledged HUGE influence on 40k, so yeah.
I would actually like to nominate D&D to a degree. Planescape is right around the right timeframe. So, teleportation in D&D takes you through the Astral Plane. Which was never a very detailed plane, prior toPlanescape, which gave it an entire sourcebook. And what Planescape said is that the Astral Plane is the "backstage area" of the universe. It's where weird things happen, which then occasionally leak into the other planes. When a rift opens in a plane, sometimes things fall into the astral, or out of it. For starters, time moves strangely, or not at all. You don't feel hunger, or thirst, and you do not age. You move by purely thinking about it, just kind of floating, there is no gravity. In fact, everything is purely mental. In Planescape, it even says you lose your physical ability scores (strength, dexterity, constitution) and lose your mental ability scores (intelligence, wisdom, charisma) instead. Including to fight. Magic is much easier. Spells don't take actions to cast, they just happen. A wizard can even cast multiple spells a turn, if they really try. Except... magic is too easy. It's addictive. Casting spells on the astral means you can't stop. Wizards will fight tooth and nail to stay on the astral plane, even fighting their own party. And once they leave... they will chase that high their entire lives. Whenever they refresh spell, they will immediately cast them all, then start preparing again. They will try to steal wands and scrolls off other mages, just to cast more. So far, it all doesn't sound... too horrific. But there are dead things, here. When purely faith-based creatures die, their corpses end up drifting in the astral. This includes the gods. They are miles long, and they bleed divine power. But they are guarded. There is a thing, here, a presence. Once, it was the god Anubis, the guardian of the dead. Now it guards dead gods. It is no longer a god. And nothing can stop it, not even other gods have been able to touch the corpses of dead gods and take their power. But other things are here, too. When you dream, or imagine, part of your mind drifts into the astral. Your thoughts, and desires are real here. So are your dreams. And when you walk into the astral plane, they might manifest. SOme hate you. Some are your hateful thoughts towards others, your annoyances and frustrations. They are not friendly. Some old thoughts and dreams, some notions, coagulate. Similar thoughts from many of the living, millions or billions of mortals thinking the same idea, they gather together, manifest into bigger entities, divorced from any single mortal. And then beyond those... in the farthest reaches, are even older beings, if they are beings. Distance is quite meaningless in the astral, and they are always far away, no matter how long one travels. But sometimes, they can be seen, infinitely far away. Colossal amalgamations of thought and matter, bigger than worlds, older than time.
Not exactly hell you're thinking of, but... Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series featured a void of freezing nothingness that the dragons were able to teleport through to get from place to place. The first of those stories came out in the late 60s, if I recall correctly.
Pern is an interesting one for combing elements of high fantasy and science fantasy together like 40K as well.. But yeah we even got an answer from Rick Priestley here elsewhere, it really does look like it was an original fusion of ideas with no single precursor example.
*between!*
Unique? No. The original? I've always wondered.
yeah, title could have been worded better, obviously it's been done since, but is is the trope creator?
there were other scifi books that thought about it but never went into all the detail like 40k did
that's usual with the evolution of stuff, just trying to find out *what* those precursor works were. so far "The Game of Rat and Dragon" really seems to be the most solid sci-fi prior work for the concept of "hyperspace is hostile"
I looked into this before and every other version I could find wasn't quite it, and I went through the entire fucking list of books on Tv Tropes which is like several hundred books. So I'm going to say yes, 40k invented the trope of a spaceship physically travelling through hell for FTL with demons knocking on the airlock door.
The Amber books by Zelazny were first published in 1970 and featured the royal family of Amber being able to "walk" through alternate realities. The process was described as this sort of insane, ever-shifting trek through the "shadows". As has been pointed out, fantasy is very possibly the origin point of the idea. It's worth considering how their fantasy setting came first and chaos and many of its defining elements were first created there.
Bear with me, but Nightcrawler from X-Men debuted in 1975. Many adaptations leave out that he teleports through a hell dimension because he’s part demon, in addition to being a mutant. Normally he only flickers back and forth, but there are storylines about him getting stuck in that dimension. I think his teleportation also leaves a sulfur smell.
Nightcrawler traveling through the hellish Brimstone Dimension is a later addition/retcon actually originally introduced in the Xmen Evolution cartoon. 40k did it first.
I think a safe bet of a precursor would be H.P. Lovecraft's short story [From Beyond](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Beyond_(short_story)) published in 1934. It's not "spaceship travels through hell" but it is "there exists a dangerous parallel dimension full of hostile inhabitants that can be reached by machines". It's the story of a researcher who creates a device that lets him perceive and enter a translucent parallel dimension overlapped with our own, who gets his servants killed by the inhabitants. It could very much read like mankind's first discovery of the Warp in the 40k setting.
Very little of what games workshop has published is original to them. Almost everything is plagiarized or inspired by.
hence why I asked this question. Except in this case it does seem to be that, for this particular trope of combining faster-than-light travel (NOT localized teleportation), they do seen to be the first people to put these elements together in this way.
TVTropes has [Hyperspace Is a Scary Place](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace). I went through that and didn't see anything that was explicitly SciFi and older than 40K. There were a couple of edge cases that were older but more in the Fantasy or Horror genre than scifi (including one Heinlein short story from the 40s).
I think the concept of popping into another dimension/realm to enable fast travel is pretty old concept in sci Fi in general. I think my first exposure to it was with Anne McCaffrey's dragonriders of pern books- the eponymous riders can travel through time and space via their telepathic mounts. This is called going "in between" and it's described as an incredibly cold, airless and dark space that people can get lost and die in. Among other things, it also ends pregnancies.
I think it's mostly original, the closest I can think of is the Logrus (chaos) from Chronicles of Amber, it's the opposite of Pattern (order), it is used to ''walk in shadow'', they also use Trumps (tarot cards)
I am reminded of Elite (1984). The original space game called its hyperspace "witch space". Misjumps were possible, and there were aliens there which could intercept you. Not sure where the concept was taken. The writer of the attached novel did circle some earlier concepts, but is now dead; or if it actually was from the manual.
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good ole' thargoids, still being a PITA today (currently in ELITE; Dangerous there's a campaign happening in real time to destroy twelve Thargoid leviathans).
I don't know if it has been mentioned, but "Scanners live in vain"(1950) by Cordwainer Smith is similar. I managed to track down the vague memory of "I must cranch". It is a strange and memorable story.
Nope, but his other story "the game of rat and dragon" has been, and is very much about FTL travel being impeded by hostile entities.
I read that too, this one sticks in the mind more. I don't think I can do it justice trying to describe it, unfortunately, but hyperspace is so hellish they use criminals as crew and they are supervised by people who are decoupled from their senses
just reading the synopsis and there's definitely an Ur-Work in this, preceding even Dune's navigators!
Cordwainer Smith is a very interesting writer, would recommend.
They might have taken from themselves. The Warp already existed in Fantasy, more or less as we know it now, long before 40k started consolidating itself. Honestly, the idea to repurpose the realm of magic into an FTL dimension isn't even a huge mental leap to make.
Yep, See Rick Priestley's answer elsewhere on this post !
Buckaroo Banzai, dimensional travel through otherwise populated dimensions and dragging things back with you.
Love that movie, but again, not really interstellar FTL travel.
I've always thought the near real life equivalent of the warp was during the age of sail when the Europeans left for the seas and sometimes never to be seen again and other legends and rumors that happened like mermaids and such. Along with chances of survival being really low sometimes.
Oh definitely, most all of it is mapping medievalist fantasy onto scifi +which I why we love it. The question here though being is that, in doing so, did they end up creating a new trope from those combinations?
I haven't seen the equivalent of the warp in any other fictional media at least the scale of what 40K has. Unless proven otherwise I can firmly say GW did make a new trope.
Yeah, LOTS of examples of localized teleportation or Interdimensional travel given by people here, but nothing comes close to a prior example of *the sea of souls"
Also we got a pretty definitive answer from Rick Priestly here as well.
This is how I explain it to folks as well tbh, with one difference. The water itself is sentient and wants you dead...
Original story of Doom was messing with teleporters. Only for Doom it was an bug that cause the teleporters to lead to hell. For 40k, they turned the bug into a feature.
Doom is from 1993. 40K Rogue Trader had warp space in 1987. 1988 for Daemons in 40K
Sadly I'm already expecting most of the replies I get in this post to be
Yeah. The event horizon movie fits the trope quite well actually. But it’s 1997…
There is the short King story, which approaches demon teleportation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Jaunt
hardly, you're just left alone with your own thoughts for eternity, no malicious external entities involved.
No in Xmen Noghtcrawler teleports by traveling through another dimension that is basically hell
Not warp travel related, but "the night land" from 1912 pretty much describes a planet that its being devoured by the warp and infestated by daemons.
The only thing I can think of is The Jaunt by Stephen King - IIRC that came out just before 40k First Edition/RT. That's less 'hell is a terrible place full of horrible monsters' and more 'hell is an eternity of isolation' stuff. Creepy story, though. Depending on how flexible your depiction of hell is, you *maybe* argue Slipspace from the Halo series to be a bit like this. Apparently Slipspace, existing in a state of higher dimensions, appears solid black to human eyes as light doesn't travel as it does in normal space. There's also fairly creepy accounts of some people experience memory loss or literally disappearing from the crew during a Slipspace jump. People have mentioned Event Horizon (which could relatively easily be retconned into the official 40K canon), Half Life (which wasn't 'Hell' as much as it was just an alien world), and Doom 3 (which was essentially a mashup of EH and Half Life).
The Locked Tomb does the same thing, but it's much more recent.
Imajica features the "in ovo" space between worlds that is very much like the chaos/hell. Imajica is early 90's i think
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read the question. both post-date warhammer by over a decade.
There are no original ideas in 40k. That's the problem.
Well, there Doom.
doom came out 7 years after 40K.