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The word "portal" in science fiction and fantasy generally refers to a technological or magical doorway that connects two distant locations separated by spacetime. It usually consists of two or more gateways, with an object entering one gateway leaving via the other instantaneously.
Places that are linked by a portal include a different spot in the same universe (in which case it might be an alternative for teleportation); a parallel world (inter-dimensional portal); the past or the future (time portal); and other planes of existence, such as heaven, hell or other afterworlds. A parallel world, such as the Wood between the Worlds in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, may exist solely to contain multiple portals, perhaps to every parallel world in existence.
Portals are similar to the cosmological concept of a wormhole, and some portals work using wormholes.
Use
A "jumpgate" of the X Universe, part of a space-travel network.A "Rift Gate" of the video game Primal used for transport between different realms of Oblivion
Portals are often used in science fiction to move protagonists into new territory. In video games, the concept is often used to allow the player to cover territory that has already been explored very quickly. A related book plot that is commonly used is the struggle to get to the opposite end of a new gate for the first time before it can be used.
Film and television
In film and television, a portal is often portrayed using a ripple effect.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (TV series): Portals appeared in the series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979–1981), where interstellar travel was facilitated by a network of portals.
Cowboy Bebop: In the animeCowboy Bebop, hyperspace gates allow for faster—though not instantaneous—travel between the planets and colonies of the solar system.
Donnie Darko: In the movie Donnie Darko, a portal appears on a cinema screen.[1] A fictional book within the film (Philosophy of Time Travel) serves as the basis for fan theories about time travel, parallel universes and portals.[2]
Doraemon: In the Japanese comic and anime series Doraemon, where the Anywhere Door is used to travel from any point to another. This door looks like and operates like an ordinary household door.
The Final Countdown: In the movie The Final Countdown, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz is transported via a portal to 1941, where its Captain must decide whether to intervene in the Pearl Harbor attack.
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: In the cartoon series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power the characters are able to travel through time and space by using magic space portals and time corridors. They can be used by characters with magic abilities, and are usually of a yellow color. Sometimes they can have a pink or purple appearance. In some instances, a portal allows travel from one place to another in just a few moments. In other cases (the She-Ra-Episode "Darksmoke and Fire"), the user travels through a separate dimension and can change his destination en route.
Gargoyles: Two types of portal existed in Disney's mid-1990s Gargoyles animated fantasy adventure series; one was usable from any body of water while in a boat of any size, and took the traveler(s) to the series' depiction of the enchanted island of Avalon through the reciting of the Latin-language "Avalon spell",[3] while the other was through the use of the fictional, enchanted "Phoenix Gate" artifact, which took the traveler(s) to any time and place that the person that held the device was thinking of when they recited a different Latin-language spell to activate the artifact's occult powers.[4]
Gravity Falls: In Gravity Falls, Dipper and Mabel's Great Uncle Ford constructed a portal underneath the Mystery Shack. It was used by his twin brother Stan to bring him back from an unknown dimension.
Howl's Moving Castle: In the Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle, based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's castle has a door with a four-color dial above it, and each color setting causes a different location to appear on the other side of the door, only one of which is immediately outside the castle.
Jackie Chan Adventures: In the cartoon series Jackie Chan Adventures, eight demons were sealed away using portals to trap each of them in a different realm. The portals could be opened again. The demons were released but later recaptured and returned in the netherworld. A spell was used on each portal to seal it forever, ensuring that the demons could never escape again.
Jak and Daxter: "Warp gates" in Jak and Daxter are rings enclosing a rippling blue substance used for transportation.
The Legend of Korra: In The Legend of Korra, the two-spirit portals connect the physical world and the spirit world, allowing passage to the spirit world without meditation. However, a new portal was created in the center of Downtown Republic City after Kuvira's spirit energy weapon overloaded.
Lost in Space (film): The 1998 film Lost in Space featured a space-bound hypergate system. The premise of the film is that the Robinson family will pilot a spaceship to Alpha Centauri to construct a receiving hypergate, allowing instantaneous travel between Earth and Alpha Centauri.
Mighty Max: In the Mighty Max television series and toyline, the titular character Max receives a magical baseball cap capable of projecting wormhole-like portals that allow Max to teleport across time and space and even travel to alternate dimensions and the astral plane.
Monsters, Inc.: The animated film Monsters, Inc. involved portals that open through the doors of children's closets. This enabled the inhabitants of the monster world to enter children's bedrooms and cause them to scream. Children's screams are the power source of the monster world and are siphoned through the portals into containers for refinement. Each portal is an exact replica of a child's wooden closet door in a metal frame, allowing a monster to enter that child's room. Some portals have metal doors and open to counterparts in remote locations in the human world. The finale features a wild chase through a massive gallery of closet door portals, causing jumps between places such as Paris, Japan, and Tahiti.
ReBoot: A portal in ReBoot, created by the villainous character Megabyte, displays a rippling event horizon.
Starcraft (series): The StarCraft series features warp gates that are similar in style and function.
Stargate Franchise: The Stargate franchise uses wormholes as one of the primary methods of travel between planets. Large rings are placed on, or in orbit around planets throughout the universe. When the travelers "dial" the address of their destination, a wormhole is formed between the two Stargates.[5]
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Star Trek depicted devices called "Iconian Gateways" with angular frames and ripple effects such as the one in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Contagion".
Star Trek: Voyager: In Star Trek: Voyager and the game Star Trek: Armada II, the Borg have a technology known as the transwarp conduit. The aperture of the conduit at the transwarp hub resembles the event horizon of a Stargate crossed with the wormhole effect created by the Stargate.
Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In the animated television series Star vs. the Forces of Evil, characters open portals to other dimensions using Dimensional Scissors.
Portals are prominent in the 1987–1996 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, as a method of transportation between distant locations and even through time. The most famous portal of the series is inside Krang's Technodrome but from the third season, Donatello also develops a portal generator.
Transformers: In Transformers, the Decepticons built the Space Bridge, which serves a similar purpose. A large round ring built on Earth (lying flat) would create a subspace tunnel to a destination tower on Cybertron. One key difference in function was that matter was not broken apart for transport.
Treasure Planet: In Treasure Planet, the portal is an enormous energy doorway that allows practical, rapid travel between Treasure Planet and a distant location anywhere in the universe. The spherical map (holographic projector) that led to Treasure Planet also worked as the portal's control panel once plugged into a keyhole and would project an orbital list of locations. One-touch on one of the projected destinations and the portal would instantly open a doorway, large enough for a ship to pass through, to that destination. It is possible that the portal was built by the ancient alien race that created the map and the planet itself (which is actually a large, spherical mechanism composed of incredibly advanced technology).
Imaginationland: The Movie: In Imaginationland: The Movie, the boys are told of a portal into Imaginationland that had been built during the Cold War and is controlled by the government. The Pentagon decides to send a group of soldiers into Imaginationland through the portal.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: In the fourth generation of My Little Pony, portals are often depicted as rifts through space and time, and can be opened by a being with powerful magic, or with specific powerful magical items (such as the Elements of Harmony). These portals can be used for transportation between universes (as is the case in the Equestria Girls series); or can be used for banishment (as seen in the season seven episode, Shadow Play,[6][7] and in Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks)
Rick and Morty : Portals in Rick and Morty are a very common occurrence and are portrayed as green, rippling clouds. They seem to be very water-like and will stretch when gone through. They come out of Rick’s Portal Gun and can be set to different places.
Literature
In his Hyperion Cantos novel series, Dan Simmons imagines a network of portals called "farcasters" which connect most human-inhabited planets. The form these portals take can vary, and they may be opaque, completely transparent, or semi-transparent. The completely transparent variety is very commonly used and effectively turns all connected places into one giant WorldWeb where distance becomes almost meaningless. Some of the more opulent occupants may have houses where each room is built on a different planet, and some rooms themselves may be partially built in several different physical locations but be joined by forecaster portals to form one complete room.
Stephen Robinett's book Stargate[8] (1976) revolves around the corporate side of building extra-dimensional and/or transportational stargates. In the novel, the stargate is given the name Jenson Gate, after the fictional company that builds it. Andre Norton's 1958 novel Star Gate may have been the first to use that term for such portals. The plot of Robert A. Heinlein'sTunnel in the Sky (1955) uses a portal. Raymond Jones' Man of Two Worlds (aka Renaissance) (1944) employs a portal that turns out to be a fraud.[9]
The Shi'ar, an extraterrestrial race introduced by Marvel Comics in 1976, also utilize a network of stargates. The Shi'ar utilizes both planet-based stargates (for personal travel) and enormous space-based versions (equivalent to the Ori supergate and used as portals for spaceships), though both are usually depicted without any physical structure to contain the wormhole. They are used for travel across great distances.
In the His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman has characters use the 'subtle knife' to carve a doorway from one world to another. CJ Cherryh's Morgaine series see the main characters traveling via 'gates' from world to world, closing them as they go.
Since the introduction of the stargate on the big screen, other authors have referenced the stargate device. Authors Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince also write of The Stargate Conspiracy: The Truth About Extraterrestrial Life and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt. The book details an alternative theory links the term stargate with Egypt's past: Either the pyramid itself is a gateway to the stars (because of the shafts pointing to a star) or a construction of Heaven on Earth based on geographical location of the great and outlying pyramids (see: Orion).
The basic concept of the portal as a link to another point in space, within the same universe. Going through the blue portal from a height preserves momentum when exiting the orange portal.
Stargate-like devices referred to as warp zones, are abundant in video games, as they can be used to split a game neatly into levels. The video gamesPrimal and Turok the Dinosaur Hunter feature gateways allowing instantaneous travel between locations to this effect. In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, a number of ring-shaped dimensional portals allow the main character to travel between Light and Dark versions of the planet Aether. In the game EVE Online, a large object called a "stargate" lets the player travel between solar systems, and in Homeworld 2, Hyperspace Gates serve as the centerpiece of one of the game's final missions, in which massive rings create wormholes capable of transporting matter great distances. In Super Mario 64 and its follow up, Super Mario Sunshine, various paintings and warp pipes lead to levels, all connected by a bigger level that houses these portals. Portals are used frequently throughout the Spyro (series), with each individual level, or world, separated by portals, allowing for loading screens which do not damage the game's immersion.
In Bioshock Infinite, Elizabeth is able to open up portals ("Tears") from another period of time either future or past, in an alternate dimension of their world.
In Command and Conquer: Generals,tunnel network serves as a portal for GLA faction. This is a building that can garrison some units. These units can exit from every tunnel network of their base without any relay. It is supposed that they travel underground with relatively high velocities, but they seem to be teleported.
In Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, the alien race Scrin uses portals to transport their armies onto and across the battlefields. The description of their Gravity Stabilizer states that the structure compensates for Earth's intense gravity and magnetic field, "allowing Alien spacecraft to execute short-range teleportation jumps directly to the battlefield".
Portals are common in MMORPGs. In RuneScape, portals can be used domestically. Players can install portal chambers in their houses that link to different cities in the world, allowing free transport to these places for both them and any visitors to their houses.[10]
In World of Warcraft, mages can summon portals that can teleport the mages and their group members to various cities.
In Heroes of the Storm, Warcraft hero called Medivh has an ability to summon portals as part of his ability kit, allowing allies to teleport between them in both directions.
In the augmented reality game Ingress portals are placed at sculptures, statues, and other public art, unique businesses, and historically and architecturally significant buildings and the like, but serve as nodes in the game mechanics (see graph theory) without any transportation function.
Portals are a pivotal theme and gameplay mechanic in Portal and its sequel, Portal 2, created by and developed by Valve. Portal introduces a portal-creating device, known as the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, as a central game mechanic which is used to solve puzzles and reach otherwise inaccessible destinations. The portals are depicted with few special visual effects; instead, they are shown as representations of the destination, bordered by blue or orange particle effects. In The Lab, the player can use hand-mounted portals to travel to various "pocket universes".
In Half-Life and its expansions, which are set in the same fictional universe as the Portal franchise, portals appear as glowing red-green balls of energy which instantly teleport the user to an inversely colored exit point, although unlike the portals seen in Portal, the destination of these portals cannot be seen before crossing into them. A different kind of portal with a purple surface appears at the end of Half-Life: Opposing Force, which serves to transport the final boss of the game, the Gene Worm, to Earth. In Half-Life 2, it is revealed that the Resonance Cascade as seen in Half-Life had created a dimensional rift that allowed a vicious alien race known as the Combine to invade and subjugate Earth. Another side effect of the Resonance Cascade was the creation of "portal storms", destructive waves of energy that spread outwards in a storm-like manner while opening a multitude of portals to other dimensions, which ravaged the landscape and transported countless alien creatures to Earth. In Half-Life 2: Episode One, the Combine attempt to use the destruction of the Citadel in City 17 to open a superportal to the Combine Overworld in order to summon reinforcements to battle the human Resistance movement, but during the events of Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the Resistance successfully destroy the superportal before it can be completed. Like the portals in Portal, the Combine superportal was transparent, so spires on the Combine Overworld could be glimpsed on the other side.
In the game Minecraft created by Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, it is possible to build a portal to an alternate hell-like dimension called "The Nether".[11][12] It is accessed by making a frame of obsidian blocks, with a 3×2 rectangle in the centre, then setting it on fire using any object that can make fire. When lit, the frame will be filled with blocks resembling whirlpools. A player standing in the portal long enough will be transported to "The Nether," which consists of caves, lava, fortresses, mushrooms, neutral zombie pigmen, magma-slime creatures, tall black "wither skeletons", and fire shooting "ghasts" and "blazes". Another kind of portal in Minecraft is the End Portal, which is a portal found 128 (only 3 in the console version) times in "Strongholds" throughout the world. The players use "Eyes of Ender" to find the End Portal, and places one Eye of Ender in each frame-block (if not already there). When completed and entered, the player will go the "End", filled with mobs called "Enderman". The only way out of the End is to either get killed or kill the Ender Dragon, which opens a portal back to the Overworld.
The technology in Star Trek has borrowed freely from the scientific world to provide storylines. Episodes are replete with references to tachyon beams, baryon sweeps, quantum fluctuations and event horizons. Many of the technologies created for the Star Trek universe were done so out of simple financial necessity—the transporter was created because the limited budget of the original series in the 1960s did not allow expensive shots of spaceships landing on planets.
A sleeper ship is a hypothetical type of crewed spacecraft in which most or all of the crew spends the journey in some form of hibernation or suspended animation. The only known technology that allows long-term suspended animation of humans is the freezing of early-stage human embryos through embryo cryopreservation, which is behind the concept of embryo space colonization.
A parallel universe, also known as a parallel dimension, alternate universe or alternate reality, is a hypothetical self-contained plane of existence, co-existing with one's own. The sum of all potential parallel universes that constitute reality is often called a “multiverse". While the three terms are generally synonymous and can be used interchangeably in most cases, there is sometimes an additional connotation implied with the term "alternate universe/reality" that implies that the reality is a variant of our own, with some overlap with the similarly-named alternate history. The term "parallel universe" is more general, without implying a relationship, or lack of relationship, with our own universe. A universe where the very laws of nature are different – for example, one in which there are no Laws of Motion – would in general count as a parallel universe but not an alternative reality and a concept between both fantasy world and earth.
An overwhelming majority of fiction is set on or features the Earth. However, authors of speculative fiction novels and writers and directors of science fiction film deal with Earth quite differently from authors of conventional fiction. Unbound from the same ties that bind authors of traditional fiction to the Earth, they can either completely ignore the Earth or use it as but one of many settings in a more complicated universe, exploring a number of common themes through examining outsiders' perceptions of and interactions with Earth.
Stargate is an adventure military science fiction franchise.
A Stargate is an Einstein–Rosen bridge portal device within the Stargate fictional universe that allows practical, rapid travel between two distant locations. The devices first appear in the 1994 Roland Emmerich film Stargate, and thereafter in the television series Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe. In these productions, the Stargate functions as a plot generator, allowing the main characters to visit alien planets without the need for spaceships or any other type of technology. The device allows for near-instantaneous travel across both interstellar and extragalactic distances.
Stargate is a science fiction media franchise based on the film written by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. The franchise is based on the idea of an alien Einstein–Rosen bridge device that enables nearly instantaneous travel across the cosmos. The franchise began with the film Stargate, released on October 28, 1994, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Carolco, which grossed US$197 million worldwide. In 1997, Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner created a television series titled Stargate SG-1 as a sequel to the film. This show was joined by Stargate Atlantis in 2004, Stargate Universe in 2009, and a prequel web series, Stargate Origins, in 2018. Also consistent with the same story are a variety of books, video games and comic books, as well as the direct-to-DVD movies Stargate: Children of the Gods, Stargate: The Ark of Truth, and Stargate: Continuum, which concluded the first television show after 10 seasons.
Hyperspace is a notion from science fiction of a superluminal method of travel. It is typically described as an alternative "sub-region" of space co-existing with our own universe which may be entered using an energy field or other device. In most fiction, hyperspace is described as a physical place that can be entered and exited. Once in hyperspace, the laws of general and special relativity do not behave in the same way when compared to normal outer space, allowing travelers though hyperspace to go great distances without being physically present in normal space and taking less time, measured from normal outer space, to travel said distance. "Through hyper-space, that unimagineable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time." Hyperspace is a part of the universe where time can be traveled just like normal space's distance. This allows faster-than-light travel which is necessary to have practical outer space travel.
In the fictional universe of the Stargate franchise, the people of Earth have encountered numerous extraterrestrial races on their travels through the Stargate. In addition to a diversity of alien life, there is also an abundance of other humans, scattered across the cosmos by advanced aliens in the distant past. Some of the most significant species in Stargate SG-1 are the Goa'uld, the Asgard, and the Replicators. Stargate Atlantis, set in the Pegasus galaxy, introduced the Wraith and the Asurans. One of the most influential species in Stargate, the Ancients, have moved on to a higher plane of existence. For practical reasons of television productions, almost all of the alien and human cultures in the Stargate's fictional universe speak native English. Because of the time constraints of an hour-long episode, it would become a major hindrance to the story each week if the team had to spend a sizeable part of each episode learning to communicate with a new species.
An Einstein–Rosen bridge, or wormhole, is a postulated method, within the general theory of relativity, of moving from one point in space to another without crossing the space between. Wormholes are a popular feature of science fiction as they allow superluminal interstellar travel within human timescales.
A farcaster is an instantaneous transportation device in the fictional Hyperion universe. Farcasters allow two points separated by a vast distance to be brought together at a Farcaster Portal. The Farcaster network connects hundreds of planets of the Hegemony of Man into their WorldWeb. The Farcaster network allowed transport between connected worlds without any time discrepancy, unlike Hawking drive transport provided by spaceships of the Hegemony era. The Farcaster was developed by the Artificial Intelligences (AIs) of the TechnoCore and given to humanity sometime after the Hegira.
Time portals are doorways in time, employed in various fiction genres, especially science fiction and fantasy, to transport characters to the past or future.
Evochron Renegades is a freeform videogame that forms the 2007 installment in the indie StarWraith 3D Games series of space simulation games. It is the sequel to Evochron: Alliance 2.0. Evochron Renegades features a vast and seamless universe that lets the player fly anywhere, without loading screens or choppy environment flipping. The game is especially notable for being the successful product of a one-man development studio.
Supernovae in works of fiction often serve as plot devices.
Interstellar travel is a common feature of fiction such as science fiction and fantasy.
Teleportation is the theoretical transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. It is a common subject in science fiction literature, film, video games, and television. In some situations teleporting is time travelling across space.
An extradimensional being is a type of hypothetical entity in a dimension beyond our own. Such beings are common in science fiction, fantasy and supernatural fiction.
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