alternate universe n. 1

At last the superlative magazine series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, recounting Harold Shea’s experiences with the mathematics of magic in alternate universes, is all in print in a completely revised and expanded form.

Have you ever had the sneaking suspicion that, after all, there really is an alternate universe to the one we know?

Dual time-tracks, alternate universes.

So with science fiction novels. They may locate themselves in distant futures on Earth, or on one of the planets of the solar system, or anywhere in our galaxy, or even in a distant galaxy; or they may occupy a different probability sphere or another time-track entirely (there are at least three brilliant alternate universe novels, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, in which the South won the American Civil War; Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! in which George Washington was shot and the American Revolution never happened; and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, in which the Axis powers won World War II).

Science fiction has provided us not only with visions of time travel and hence of alternate time streams, but of whole alternate universes. The term ‘alternate universe’ may refer simply to the universe in which history follows an alternate time stream, but more strictly speaking, it refers to a universe somehow complete and yet coexistent with ours.

In Eon, an artificial worldlet called the Thistledown, which somehow arrives from the future, contains the machinery for generating ‘The Way’, a kind of tubular wormhole universe, fifty kilometers in diameter and more or less infinitely long, snaking, not only through space and time, but alternate universes too, capable of being colonized along its endless interior, but also serving as a kind of space-time Metro with gates leading into other worlds, other times, other alternate realities.

This started off as a story by Jack called ‘The Alpha Tree’, about a boy who could see into alternate universes… I skewed Jack’s idea somewhat, building the story instead around a concept that had long fascinated me—an intuition of how easy it would be to become lost among the billions of probability-worlds that are born and die around us every second of every day.

To make it credible the ‘Western Barbarians’ can deploy witchfire at need, for this is more Sword-&-Sorcery than an alternate-universe story.

I encountered her in the very first alternate universe I ever visited: a futuristic London where she was the daughter of a duchess.