prespace

English

Etymology

From pre- +‎ space.

Adjective

prespace (not comparable)

1. (science fiction) Of a civilization: having yet to develop space travel.
   • 2016, Evan Currie, Warrior King, Seattle, O.R.: 47North, →ISBN, page 233:

     "No way to tell now," Miram admitted. "Lots of space junk around the second planet, though. Could be native, an example of a prespace culture making the transition, but the debris could also be the results of a mining operation or something else I have no frame of reference for."

Noun

prespace (plural prespaces)

1. Any of various theoretical states of physical existence that precede or underlie three-dimensional space.
   • 1994, Daniel Athearn, Scientific Nihilism: On the Loss and Recovery of Physical Explanation, Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, →ISBN, page 325:

     To speak of "the space of three dimensions" (represented abstractly as a coordinate grid), or "space occupied by matter posihoned within it," is to speak about the product aspect. The process aspect is the "prespace" of transition in presencing.

   • 2005, Metod Saniga, Rosolino Buccheri, Avshalom C Elitzur, Endophysics, Time, Quantum And The Subjective:

     Our prequantum space — prespace — is essentially larger than the ordinary classical space.

   • 2008, Ervin László, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World, Rochester, V.T.: Inner Traditions, →ISBN, page 113:

     At the logically extrapolated but empirically unverifiable beginning of the cosmic process, only the field domain existed, in a primordial state. This was a spatially and temporally unbounded sea of fluctuating virtual energies: the prespace of the actualized universe.

   • 2016, Brother Abaris ·, The Illuminist Army:

     They considered spacetime itself as part of an explicate order that is connected to an implicate order that they called prespace.

Related terms

• prespaced

 

References

• Jesse Sheidlower, editor (2001–2024), “prespace, adj.”, in Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.