Hyperspace: the word

A mathematician's word for space with more than three dimensions (recorded from 1852) is borrowed by a pulp writer in 1928, made into a drive by Campbell in 1931, passed down the magazine he came to edit and made universal by Star Wars in 1977, while the physics it sounds like never meant any of it.

Kind: lineage · Span: 1852–1977 · Last reviewed: 2026-09-13

The line

The word came first and the idea came later. "Hyperspace" was a term of nineteenth-century geometry for a space of more than three dimensions, and the Oxford English Dictionary's third edition dates that sense to 1852 [MED] S2 (as reported in the etymology note of the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction; the OED itself is behind a paywall and was not opened). It is the same sense the physics of extra dimensions still uses, which is why the physics end of this line is Kaluza-Klein and the hyperspace reading: Kaluza's fifth dimension (1921) and Klein's compact circle (1926) are hyperspace in the 1852 meaning, more directions on the same manifold, and nothing else. The fiction sense, a separate region with its own rules that a ship can enter and leave, has no counterpart there, which is what the register's MAN-1 says.

The fiction sense grew in two steps. Kirk Meadowcroft's "The Invisible Bubble" (Amazing Stories, September 1928) used "hyper-space" as a place next door to ours, with "boundary lines" that "may not be so rigidly drawn as we have supposed", but nobody travels by it [HIGH] S2 (Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, entry "hyperspace", first two citations). Three years later John W. Campbell's Islands of Space (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring 1931) attached the word to a way of beating light, and that is the first such use the dictionary can find [HIGH] S2. The catalogue's dossier on that text, Campbell 1931, records the twist: Campbell's ship does not go anywhere. Its main coil affects "all the space about it" so that the crew are "enclosed in what might be called a hyperspace of our own making", and the ship then moves at any speed it pleases [HIGH] S1 (chapter 5 of the revised text, Project Gutenberg 20988). In the catalogue's own terms that is an L2 move, a pocket of altered space carried with the ship, sixty-three years before Alcubierre, and not the L4 move the word came to mean. The one sentence that is certainly from 1931, "in the hyperspace we are going into, a new condition exists", is the dictionary's citation; the rest of the drive is read from the 1957 revision.

From Campbell the word spread through the magazines. Jack Williamson (Wonder Stories, May 1934) and Murray Leinster (Astounding, June 1934) used it within three years; then Campbell took over Astounding in 1937 and the next citations are all from his magazine: E. E. Smith's Gray Lensman (December 1939), Theodore Sturgeon's "Artnan Process" (June 1941), A. E. van Vogt's "Secret Unattainable" (July 1942) and, in book form, Isaac Asimov's Foundation (1951), whose stories Campbell had bought for Astounding from 1942 [HIGH] S2 (dictionary citations; Campbell's editorship from Wikipedia). By Sturgeon the word means what it means now: a ship "slipped into hyperspace and traveled toward Procyon" at many times light speed, a place you enter and leave. Asimov's Jump fixed the pulp default, an instantaneous, computed crossing of a region "neither space nor time". The last step is the largest and the least documented. George Lucas's 1977 shooting script has Han Solo promise "we'll be safe enough once we make the jump to hyperspace" and the stage direction "stars become streaks as the pirateship makes the jump to hyperspace" [HIGH] S1 (script as hosted at IMSDb); Star Wars took a forty-six-year-old genre word and made it the one everybody knows. No document in which Lucas names the pulp source of the word has been found.

The links

FromToYearEvidenceGrade
Mathematics (1852 in the OED's dating)Meadowcroft, "The Invisible Bubble"1928The Historical Dictionary's etymology note gives the mathematical sense as the origin; Meadowcroft's "hyper-space" next to ordinary space is that sense used as a setting[MED] S2
Meadowcroft 1928Campbell, Islands of Space1931Both in Gernsback's Amazing titles three years apart; the dictionary lists them as citations one and two. No statement by Campbell that he read Meadowcroft[LOW] S2
Campbell 1931, the textCampbell 1931, the drive1931Chapter 5: the coil makes "a hyperspace of our own making"; chapter 1: light speed is a property of space, changed by the field. The drive is a carried pocket, an L2 move by its own words[HIGH] S1
Campbell 1931Williamson, "Xandulu"; Leinster, "Sidewise in Time"1934Dictionary citations four and five, both "hyper-space", Williamson's "where distance means nothing". Circulation, not a documented reading[MED] S2
Campbell as editor of Astounding (from 1937)Smith, Gray Lensman; Sturgeon, "Artnan Process"; van Vogt, "Secret Unattainable"1939–1942All three citations are from Astounding under Campbell; Sturgeon's is the first cite where hyperspace is a place ships pass through[HIGH] S2
Campbell as editorAsimov, Foundation1942–1951The Foundation stories were written for and sold to Campbell's Astounding from 1942; the dictionary's 1951 citation is the book text, "the Jump through hyper-space"[HIGH] S2
Pulp hyperspaceDark Star (O'Bannon)1974The streaking-stars visual first done here, per Wikipedia's history section; O'Bannon then worked on Star Wars[MED] S3
Pulp hyperspaceStar Wars1977Shooting script: "the jump to hyperspace", "traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops". The Historical Dictionary carries no Star Wars citation[HIGH] S1
Mathematics (1852)Kaluza 1921, Klein 1926, ADD 1998, Randall-Sundrum 19991921–1999The physics keeps the mathematical sense only: extra directions on one manifold, one light cone, no separate region. No physics paper borrows the fiction sense and no fiction borrows the physics[HIGH] S1

What is not sourced

Sources