Parallel Worlds

A world neighbouring the world of experience, but displaced from it in such a fashion as to be imperceptible and inaccessible in normal circumstances. In the days when people routinely thought of the world as a plane, it seemed reasonable to think of parallel worlds above and below it, the former often being identified with the realm of the gods and the latter with the realm of the dead. In Greek mythology both realms were equipped with portals, Mount Olympus serving as a conduit between Earth and heaven while various caverns gave admittance to the Underworld. Both notions are reflected in cosmological ideas that persisted throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, although notions of divine reward and punishment often redistributed the dead between the two realms; they were preserved in various descendant schools of *occult science, in which the Notion of ‘‘higher planes’’—especially the ‘‘astral plane’’— retains considerable imaginative authority. The Underworld is associated with many western European folkloristic accounts of supernatural beings, cropping up in many of the tales that served as ancestors to modern fairy tales, but is confused with conceptualisations in which such beings live invisibly alongside human society, either as animistic ‘‘elemental spirits’’ or in variously veiled enclaves only partially or periodically accessible to humans. The latter version became the standard strategy of literary fairy tales, laying imaginative groundwork for the extrapolation of the notion that there might be an array of parallel universes laterally displaced from ours in a fourth dimension. The latter notion was popularised at the end of the nineteenth century by such writers as C. H. *Hinton and dramatised in such stories as H. G. Wells’ ‘‘The Plattner Story’’ (1896), William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Ghost Pirates (1909), and Gerald Grogan’s A Drop in Infinity (1915). Such stories often retain echoes of the mythical thesis, placing the shades of the dead in a parallel world, while The House on the Borderland transplanted a notion commonly associated with dream fantasy, using the landscapes of a parallel world to map and symbolically display the psyche of its protagonist.

The idea of parallel worlds displaced in a fourth spatial dimension underwent a spectacular boom in twentieth-century fiction. It was established as a useful framework for the science-fictional accommodation of alternative histories in the 1930s, encouraged by such exercises in speculative nonfiction as J. W. Dunne’s attempts to explain supposedly prophetic dreams in An Experiment with Time (1927), which led him to construct an ambitious account of The Serial Universe (1934). It was accommodated into the pulp magazines before the advent of specialist science fiction pulps in such stories as A. Merritt’s classic portal fantasy ‘‘The Moon Pool’’ (1918), Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint’s The Blind Spot (1921; book, 1951), and Philip M. Fisher’s ‘‘Worlds Within Worlds’’ (1922), and was thus established as a standard generic motif, given a more scientific gloss in such versions as Murray Leinster’s ‘‘The Fifth-Dimension Catapult’’ (1931) and ‘‘The Fifth-Dimension Tube’’ (1933).

The notion of Faerie as a parallel world made similar progress in twentieth-century fantasy fiction, generalised in J. R. R. Tolkien’s notion of fantasy settings as ‘‘Secondary Worlds’’. Secondary Worlds are usually conceivable as parallel worlds even when the inclusion of connective portals does not make the relationship explicit. The narrative utility of fantasies featuring such portals is obvious, in that they allow characters to step from the experienced world into a Secondary one, arriving as naive and inquisitive strangers whose own learning process educates the reader; Farah Mendlesohn’s ‘‘Towards a Taxonomy of Fantasy’’ (2003) identified portal fantasy as a major sector of modern fantastic fiction, intermediate in its narrative technique between immersive fantasy and intrusive fantasy. Although much science-fictional portal fantasy deals with shortcuts through space and trips through time rather than shifts into paralel worlds, the development of parallel worlds in genre science fiction made a very significant contribution to the broader genre of portal fantasy, evolving a new jargon of ‘‘dimensional doorways’’ and ‘‘gates’’ that helped to add psychological plausibility to their fantasy counterparts.

Science-fictional portals retain the same essential magicality as well as the same narrative function as portals to Faerie and its analogues, and such devices became—very appropriately—a key motif of the hybrid subgenre of science-fantasy. They facilitated genre crossovers with the same ease that they facilitated transfer between primary and secondary worlds, as illustrated by such archetypal hybrids as A. Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss (1923–1930; rev. book, 1931), C. L. Moore’s The Dark World (1946; book, 1965; by-lined Henry Kuttner) and Andre Norton’s Witch World (1963), and the chimerical crossovers that became typical of Astounding Science Fiction’s fantasy Companion Unknown, whose key templates were established by L. Sprague de Camp. The occult tradition of parallel worlds fiction, which had latched on to the notion of the fourth dimension in the late nineteenth century, also gave rise to a hybrid subgenre, carried forward by such works as John Buchan’s ‘‘Space’’ (1911) and Algernon Blackwood’s ‘‘The Pikestaffe Case’’ (1924). This too was imported into the pulp magazines, most conspicuously by H. P. Lovecraft—whose deployment of the relevant jargon was echoed by his many disciples, including August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith. Some of these writers brought a new ingenuity into their developments of the idea, especially Smith, whose ‘‘City of the Singing Flame’’ (1931) introduced Merrittesque portal fantasy into the science fiction pulps, and whose ‘‘The Dimension of Chance’’ (1932) attempts to describe a parallel world with variant physical laws.

Early pulp science fiction writers initially mined the melodramatic potential of parallel worlds in a brutally straightforward fashion, in such accounts of monstrous invasion as Edmond Hamilton’s ‘‘Locked Worlds’’ (1929) and Donald Wandrei’s ‘‘The Monster from Nowhere’’ (1935) and such accounts of heroic expeditions as Clifford D. Simak’s ‘‘Hellhounds of the Cosmos’’ (1932) and E. E. Smith’s Skylark of Valeron (1934; book, 1949). Its uses became more sophisticated in the 1940s, in such stories as Harry Walton’s ‘‘Housing Shortage’’ (1947), but it enjoyed a spectacular leap forward in the 1950s and 1960s in the context of what eventually came to be called the ‘‘multiverse’’: an infinitely extendable manifold of alternative histories.

The notion of the multiverse is implicit in such early pulp science fiction stories as Harl Vincent’s ‘‘Wanderer of Infinity’’ (1933) and ‘‘The Plane Compass’’ (1935)—the latter refers to a ‘‘superuniverse’’— and became more explicit in such time police stories as Fritz Leiber’s Destiny Times Three (1945) and Sam Merwin’s House of Many Worlds (1951) before Michael Moorcock pasted the new label on it, and demonstrated its utility as a framing concept linking the very various worlds described within his texts into an inherently chimerical superstructure. Clifford D. Simak’s Ring Around the Sun (1953) is an early celebration of the extrapolation of the idea of paralel worlds to embrace an infinite series of Earth clones— all empty of humankind in this version, and hence available for *colonisation. Simak went on to examine the possibilities of interparallel trade in ‘‘Dusty Zebra’’ (1954) and ‘‘The Big Front Yard’’ (1958). Traditional notions of parallel existence continued to echo in science fiction—as the notion of invisible coexistence did in Gordon R. Dickson’s ‘‘Perfectly Adjusted’’ (1955; exp. book 1961 as Delusion World) and transfigurations of dream fantasy in Christopher Priest’s Dream Archipelago series (1976–1999)—but the more interesting developments of the Notion involved its extension in new philosophical directions. These included the extensive exploration of paralel selves in such existential fantasies as Adolfo Bioy Casares’ ‘‘La trame ce´leste’’ (1948; trans. as ‘‘The Celestial Plot’’), Robert Donald Locke’s ‘‘Next Door, Next World’’ (1961), Brian W. Aldiss’ Report on Probability A (1968), Larry Niven’s ‘‘All the Myriad Ways’’ (1969), and Graham Dunstan Martin’s Time-Slip (1986). Other existential fantasies employing parallel worlds include Richard Cowper’s Breakthrough (1967), Robert A. Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast (1980), and Kevin J. Anderson’s ‘‘The Bistro of Alternate Realities’’ (2004), and such tales of transuniversal tourism as Robert Silverberg’s ‘‘Trips’’ (1974), Robert Reed’s Down the Bright Way (1991), and Alexander Jablokov’s ‘‘At the Cross-Time Jaunter’s Ball’’ (1987) and ‘‘Many Mansions’’ (1988). One significant narrative advantage of the use of parallel worlds is that it cuts out the necessity for elaborate modes of *transportation between fictional constructions. Faster-than-light travel is no less arbitrary a facilitating device than interdimensional portals, as is evident in the synthesis of the two kinds of portal in the ‘‘stargate’’, but the idea of a galactic community did retain an imaginative advantage by virtue of its resonance with the majesty of the night sky: the ‘‘higher’’ of the two original parallel worlds.

For much of the twentieth century, the idea of parallel worlds was regarded by scientists as an amusing corollary of mathematical fancy, but it became increasingly significant in theoretical physics as atomic theory and quantum mechanics became increasingly complicated, eventually acquiring a certain respectability when it was co-opted in 1957 by Hugh Everett and John Wheeler as the ‘‘many worlds’’ interpretation of quantum mechanical uncertainty. The number of dimensions theoretically required to account for the exotic behaviour of subatomic particles increased dramatically with the advent of string theory, and the notion of parallel universes became a key element of some versions of inflationary cosmology. Parallel worlds stories illuminated by ideas drawn from these developments in theoretical physics include Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves (1972), Bob Shaw’s A Wreath of Stars (1976), Frederik Pohl’s The Coming of the Quantum Cats (1986) and The Singers of Time (1991; with Jack Williamson), and Stephen Baxter’s Manifold trilogy (1999–2002). This is, however, one instance in which fiction has conspicuously failed to keep imaginative pace with the theory. One of the originators of string theory, Michio Kaku, became an outspoken advocate of the notion that the real existence of parallel worlds is no mere metaphysical hypothesis, but can be proven, providing a definitive summary of the issue in Parallel Worlds (2005). The inflationary version of the many worlds hypothesis was given an added twist by the proposition that there must be an ongoing process of ‘‘natural selection’’ favouring the proliferation of those universes that are most hospitable to the formation of new sub-universes, and that this intra-multiversal evolutionary process might be responsible for the implication of intelligent design inherent in the cosmological anthropic principle. Scientific American devoted a special issue to such questions in May 2003. Liza Randall’s Warped Passages: Unraveling the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (2005) calls individual universes ‘‘branes’’ (short for membranes) and the multiverse ‘‘the bulk’’.