Small Universe After All

Some Speculative Fiction writers like to keep close to home, limiting their characters' travel to within their home galaxy. For one reason or another, no one is allowed outside the galactic borders.

Other works of fiction, however, think bigger. Much, much bigger, to the point of being on a universal scale. These works of fiction do not limit their characters to travel within their own galaxy, allowing at least some people to travel freely from galaxy to galaxy, or at least do it without too much difficulty to make it worthwhile.

If an entire civilization is capable of this, expect them to be pretty high up on the Kardashev scale.

Contrast to The Milky Way Is the Only Way and What Other Galaxies?.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Interstella 5555: The aliens come to Earth from another galaxy via a wormhole.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Literal case in Dragon Ball Z where the universe only has four galaxies.
  • It mostly takes place in the Northern Galaxy but the Southern is visited in Broly-The Legendary Super Saiyan but it's implied that Broly destroyed most of the inhabited planets.
  • The Eastern and Western Galaxies only exist to give King Kai rival gods and their alien subjects for Goku to fight in the Afterlife Tournament.
  • Dragon Ball GT starts with the Black Star Dragon Balls being scattered across the universe and the protagonists have a year to find them all to save Earth. Though the Funimation dub changes universe to galaxy.
  • Dragon Ball Super retcons it to a more realistic number of galaxies.
• Vampire Wars: The two warring races are said to have used entire galaxies as their battleground.

Comic Books

• Marvel Comics: Most of the major space empires have their own galaxy. The Skrulls have Andromeda, the Kree have the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Shi'Ar have their own fictional galaxy.
  • The Silver Surfer could scoot around the galaxies with little effort.
  • Ego The Living Planet comes from the Black Galaxy.
• DC Comics
  • Superman and Supergirl: Most continuities put their home planet Krypton in our galaxy but in Superman: Birthright, it's in the Andromeda Galaxy.
  • Each individual Green Lantern is in charge of policing 1/3600 of the universe. By modern estimates, that would include tens of millions of galaxies.
  • Hawkman: The titular hero's home planet Thanagar used to orbit the real life star, Polaris. It has since been retconned into the fictional Polaris Galaxy—that or Thanagarians have their own name for the Milky Way Galaxy.
  • DC One Million: The United Planets government from the Legion of Super-Heroes has been replaced by the United Galaxies.
• Alien Legion: Tophan Galactic Union is spread across three galaxies, others are sometimes visited.
• Saga is all set within one galaxy but Alana suggests fleeing to another galaxy to avoid the war, as other people have done.
• Strontium Dog mostly refers to the universe as "The Galaxy" but some planets are quoted as being millions of light years away from each other. The Walrog invaders are said to be from the Isthman Galaxy.

Film

• Word of God says that the prawns from District 9 come from the Andromeda Galaxy.
• The Transylvanians from The Rocky Horror Picture Show don't come from the Romanian province, they're from the galaxy of Transylvania.
• The movie tagline and the novelization say that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is 3 million light years from home, so he must be from another galaxy.
  • Due to the fact that some aliens that look like E.T. make a cameo in The Phantom Menace and that the Expanded Universe said that they intended to make an expedition to another galaxy, popular Fanon has it that E.T. comes from the Star Wars Galaxy.
  • In the behind-the-scenes features of the DVD for War of the Worlds (2005), Steven Spielberg says the aliens aren't from Mars and probably come from as far away as E.T..
• Paul comes from the Andromeda Galaxy.
• Superman Film Series:
  • In Superman: The Movie, Jor-El mentions that Superman will have to pass through six galaxies to reach Earth; he also talks about the 28 known galaxies a lot.
  • A deleted scene says that Krypton is in the fictional Xeno Galaxy, the satellite readout in Superman III confirms this.
  • In Supergirl (1984), a news report near the start says that Superman is on a peacekeeping mission in a galaxy hundreds of trillions of light years away.
• Flash Gordon:
  • Ming The Merciless is implied to rule the entire universe. Every thousand years, he tests every inhabited planet with natural disasters and wipes them out if they recognize that an alien is causing them. This would explain why the only planets we see besides Earth are Mongo and its various moons.
  • When Hedonia brings Dale an alcoholic drink, she says "Many brave men died to bring it here from the galaxy of pleasure".
• Dracula 3000 is set in a region of space inconsistently referred to as the Carpathian System and the Carpathian Galaxy.
• The Morons From Outer Space vacation from the planet Blob, 14 million light years away.
• Galaxy Quest: According to the Novelization, the events in outer space are happening in another galaxy.
• Battlefield Earth: The Psychlos generally think nothing of conquering entire galaxies. This is actually scaled down from the original book where they ruled several universes.
• In Stargate they travel to the planet Abydos in the Kaliem Galaxy which is on the other side of the known universe. The TV show retcons Abydos as being in our galaxy but shows intergalactic travel as being difficult but possible.
• In Spaceballs, Lone Starr says he was born in the Ford Galaxy.
• Downplayed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For example, while the Andromeda-based civilizations of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) are capable of traveling to Earth if need be, it's implied to be rather inconvenient to actually do so. Also, while each of the Nine Realms from Thor and its sequels are located in a different galaxy, convenient travel between them is only possible using the Bifrost or other fixed portals; when the Bifrost is out of commission during The Avengers (2012), Odin has to resort to a dangerous method involving dark energy to transport Thor to Earth.

Literature

• In the Sector General books, a stricken ship from a newly discovered race (called, oddly, the Ians) is discovered to be from another galaxy.
• The original book of This Island Earth had the friendly aliens decide to pull their forces back "out of this galaxy".
• In the Robert A. Heinlein novel Have Space Suit – Will Travel, the Three Galaxies government covers three galaxies: the Lesser and Greater Magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way. They have ships that can travel instantaneously between galaxies.
• Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question": At some point in the distant future depicted by this story, mankind will develop intergalactic travel to the point where characters can casually communicate and move to different galaxies (so casually, that each one is simply "the galaxy").
• E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series includes travel between the Milky Way and another galaxy using an inertialess drive (the Bergenholm). In this instance, intergalactic travel actually allows slightly higher speeds than normal- there's less matter in intergalactic space, so less friction. It doesn't even limit itself to one universe. An accident in a hyperspatial tube sends some of the characters to another universe with a different set of physical laws. Which they promptly weaponize.
• The empire of humanity in Dune is supposed to span the entire universe. Space-folding Heighliners can go anywhere, taking the same amount of time to reappear orbiting a planet in a neighboring star system as they do to reappear orbiting a planet in a different galactic supercluster.
  • Somewhat played with in that, despite being able to go anywhere, humanity mostly sticks to the same planets it already traveled to before Foldspace technology. Part of the purpose of God-Emperor Leto II's Golden Path is to get humanity to expand out much further and really touch the ends of the universe.
    • In Chapterhouse: Dune it is speculated that Foldspace may even move people between universes as part of a multiverse. This is because even after 15 millennia, no-one really knows how Holtzman's technology works.
• The Kiint in The Night's Dawn Trilogy reveal themselves to be of extragalactic origin (or at least to have an extragalactic presence, depending on if they were telling the whole truth). And eventually, humanity moves outside of the galaxy too.
• In Roger Zelazny's interstellar Science Fantasy, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Osiris' House of Life and Anubis' House of Death are located at "opposite ends of the universe". The Gods, of course, can travel anywhere in the universe they want. It's also suggested that the teleportation power of the mysterious Prince Who Was A Thousand may even allow him to travel to other universes. Finally, The Steel General's horse Bronze can, in defiance of all laws of physics, travel twice as far with each step as with the previous. It's suggested that with enough run-up, he could circumnavigate the universe in a single stride.
• An extreme example is in the Italian short story Domenica alla Frontiera (Sunday at the Border)^note Originally written under a pseudonym to pass it for an American work: the whole Universe has been not only colonized but gentrified, and a typical week-end activity for families is traveling to the end of the Universe and watching the nothingness beyond.

Live-Action TV

• Ahsoka is introducing this trope to the Star Wars universe with Thrawn having been exiled to another galaxy and Imperial remnants constructing a hyperspace ring that will let them go and get him back. Ahsoka says the Jedi keep record of intergalactic Hyperspace Lanes used by Space Whales.
• As you might expect from a show called Andromeda, this isn't the case for Captain Dylan Hunt and his ragtag band of adventurers. They regularly travel between three galaxies, the Milky Way, Andromeda and Triangulum, and they only reason they don't go further is because those other galaxies haven't been colonized or contacted yet. It has been stated in the background material that the more well-traveled a slipstream route is, the easier it is to transverse.
• The original Battlestar Galactica started off in the Cyrannus galaxy and had the crew move to our own on the quest to reach Earth.
• Doctor Who: Any species with interstellar flight capacity can, it is implied, travel between as many galaxies as they like.
  • The TARDIS can go anywhere in time and space, so it should come as no surprise that, outside of a disproportionate fondness for Earth and humanity in general, distance poses no obstacle to the Doctor. In "The Doctor's Wife", Eleven and companions even go "outside" the universe (complete with a little bit of Lampshade Hanging on the terminology).
  • The various "Great and Bountiful Human Empires" cover multiple galaxies each.
• Power Rangers deals with multiple galaxies, referring to (inter)galactic tyrants as having conquered hundreds of the things. Speed is more or less never mentioned, as ships move at a Speed of Plot even more variable than usual, and magical teleportation is really handy in avoiding those annoying "laws of physics" things.
  • Power Rangers in Space has the Rangers searching for Zordon, whom the Legion of Doom made off with in the premiere. We get at least one instance of Andros saying something to the effect of "well, the scan's done and he's not in that galaxy; let's move on." It's said as casually as if they'd glanced into a room in a house and seen no sign of someone; "nobody in there, let's check the kitchen." The vastness of intergalactic space really is nothing to the Rangers.
  • A Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers episode, however, proves that Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale (or Kids' Show Writers Just Don't Care About Scale, anyway.) The Rangers are traveling at light speed to the Farthest Galaxy. Now, the distance to the farthest known is over thirteen billion light years. But wait, the place they named the Farthest Galaxy might actually not be that far, you say? Well, the nearest galaxy, good ol' Andromeda, would be a 2.5 million year trip at light speed. Worse, "light years" are mentioned. You'd think even if they didn't know the math, they'd know that light speed plus light years equals a team of octogenarians with attitudes.
• Aliens in Smallville tend to talk about the 28 known galaxies as a reference to Superman: The Movie.
• The Stargate-verse had extragalactic travel via Stargate established as possible fairly early on (it just needs eight chevrons and a lot of power), and Stargate Atlantis takes place almost entirely in a separate galaxy (the Pegasus Dwarf Irregular Galaxy, to be precise), with travel to and from Earth taking only a couple of weeks at worst. By the end of the series four separate galaxies (Milky Way, Pegasus, Ida, and the unnamed Ori home galaxy) were accessible. Stargate Universe, as the name implies, goes even further, with the Destiny traveling the universe dozens of galaxies away from the Milky Way.
• Oddly enough, the Kelvans from Star Trek actually did bother to do the three hundred year journey from Andromeda to the Milky Way. They were quite prepared to spend another three hundred getting home once we were conquered, then ANOTHER three hundred coming back with a proper invasion force. If Kelvans can predict the extinction of their home that far in advance and can act to avoid it, they are people to be reckoned with. Oh, and remember that they don't use suspended animation, they lived and died and had children in deep space to replace themselves. With respect to the barrier, their leader says the barrier is the reason they lost their own ship and needed to steal the Enterprise.
• The Greys from The X-Files come from the Reticulum Galaxy that has somehow run out of iron.
• The aliens in Roswell come from the planet Antar in the Whirlwind Galaxy.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000 mostly has its action confined to the Milky Way, with humans in particular limited in how far they can travel by the psychic beacon produced by the Emperor. The Tyranids, however, have travelled from at least one other galaxy. Depending on the true size of the hive/organism, they could have consumed many before reaching this one, and could even be the size of a galaxy or bigger them/itself.

Video Games

• In the Homeworld games, while it is impossible to travel to another galaxy in-game, the three Progenitor hyperspace cores are said to be powerful enough to be able to cross extragalactic distances. Also, the Naggarok was an experimental ship built by a race in another galaxy, which they tested by traveling to the Homeworld galaxy. Unfortunately, they picked up something while in hyperspace. Some sources suggest that, after the Naggarok destruction, its core was salvaged by the Vaygr, making it the Third Core that allowed them to move against the Hiigarans.
• Halo: The Ark is revealed in Halo 3 to be located outside the Milky Way. The Flood are implied to be extragalactic in origin as well.
• The Ceph from Crysis are from the Triangulum Galaxy. Apparently, the very first Ceph arrived on Earth about 65 million years ago and went into hibernation. In the third game, the Alpha Ceph manages to create a wormhole linking directly to its homeworld in Triangulum, and Prophet has to rush to close this wormhole before a colony ship from the Ceph homeworld destroys humanity.
• Pikmin 3: The opening states that the Koppaites travelled 279,000 light years to reach PNF-404 (Earth, at some point in the distant future). While the exact size of the Milky Way is not precisely known, the largest estimates only put it at 180,000 light years in diameter, meaning that the planet Koppai must be located in another galaxy (there are a number of dwarf galaxies within that radius as possibilities).
• In Xenoblade Chronicles X, after rescuing the Ma-Non from the Ganglion, you learn that there is a governing body called the Samaar Federation that has authority over a whopping six million lightyears. That means, at a minimum, the Samaar Federation controls at least three major galaxies: the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Triangulum Galaxy (Andromeda and Triangulum are roughly 2.5 - 3 million ly away) as well as dozens of minor dwarf galaxies. Even more mindblowing is the Ma-Non come from somewhere outside Samaar's jurisdiction, and they don't consider their voyage to be any great undertaking. And then they tell you that the Ganglion, this incredibly powerful alien fleet you've been fighting, are actually just small fries and are nothing more than a criminal syndicate.
• Star Ruler 2 allows players to fight across multiple galaxies should they desire. Due to performance issues though, it is usually best to just keep it to one high star count galaxy or a handful of small star count galaxies.
• In the Rin True Ending of Catherine: Full Body, Vincent says that they're heading to Andromeda after Rin has a successful tour of the galaxy.
• The Ratchet & Clank series spans at least three separate galaxies, with intergalactic travel normally taking weeks. The voyage from the Solana galaxy to Bogon in Going Commando resembles a luxury cruise while the ship taking the heroes to Polaris in Tools of Destruction knocks them out for most of the trip.

Webcomics

• In Schlock Mercenary, Petey has no particular problems with waging an intergalactic war against some dark-matter entities from Andromeda, thanks to Teraport technology - that is, true Teleportation, instant movement regardless of distance. Though towards the end it turns out that teraportation to something in the space between galaxies requires a lot more power due to the lack of gravity wells, to the point where Petey only teraports a probe the size of a kangaroo crewed by uploaded personas, to make contact with the Precursors hiding out there.

Western Animation

• Futurama travels all over, up to and including the edge of the universe. Where there is a brick wall and coin-operated binoculars that let you look into the neighboring cowboy universe.
• The Gem Homeworld in Steven Universe is once mentioned to be in a different galaxy than Earth. Despite this, they attempted to colonize Earth, and their gravity-engine based ships can go from one to the other in a few hours. However, Steven Universe: The Movie treats "the galaxy" and universe as pretty much interchangeable.
• Voltron: Legendary Defender apparently takes place on a multi-galactic scale, as the protagonists' months-long voyage back to Earth is nearly complete when they enter the Milky Way.
• While Wander over Yonder is set in a single (unnamed) galaxy full of Baby Planets, other galaxies are apparently in reach. Lord Dominator is apparently from another galaxy, and after she destroys every planet in the one she came to, one of her robots suggest moving onto another.

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