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.

Contrast to The Milky Way Is the Only Way.

Examples of Small Universe After All include:

Comic Books

• The Silver Surfer could scoot around the galaxies with little effort.
• 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.

Literature

• In the Sector General books, a stricken ship from a newly discovered race (called, oddly, the Ians) is dicovered 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Live-Action TV

• 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.
• 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.
• 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. All I can say is, 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 hijack the Enterprise.
• Since the TARDIS can go anywhere in time and space, 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).

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 3. The Ark is located outside the Milky Way. The Flood are extragalactic in origin as well.

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.
  • Technically, teraport to another galaxy is said to be extremely expensive compared to "local" (which can be done by missiles and mini-probes). But Petey had near-unlimited energy, and needed to teraport there only once, to deploy a gate - stabilized reception allows to jump even into actively interdicted areas, let alone naturally "hard to squeeze through" paths.

Western Animation

• Futurama travels all over, up to and including the edge of the universe.