Vaster Spaces

Speculatively and imaginatively, what is beyond and vaster than intergalactic space?

We can begin our outward journey in the company of CS Lewis:

"I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they could be on this small ball of Earth. I had got 'out' in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. It is the impossibility of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard."

-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 26.

 

I have always remembered this passage. But Lewis has projected a blue sky and a green plain into his larger space. Let us now follow a three-stage progression with Poul Anderson and Mike Carey:

 

in Anderson's Tau Zero, a relativistic spaceship traverses the vast dark spaces between clusters of clusters of clusters of galaxies;

 

in Anderson's "Door to Anywhere," a man looks into the vacuum where distant universes are visible as small points of light;

 

in Carey's Lucifer: Evensong, God and Lucifer, both retired, meet in a spatio-temporal void where they can see universes begin, briefly exist, then end:

God: Let's take a table at the edge of the terrace. We can watch the creations enjoy their brief efflorescences.

-Mike Carey, Lucifer: Evensong (New York, 2007),  p. 151, panel 4.

 

And maybe that is as far as imagination can take us?

 

Now that we have reached a round number of posts for this month, will I pause until the beginning of next month? Time will tell.