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Parallel universe (fiction)

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Parallel universe or alternate reality in science fiction and fantasy is a self-contained separate reality coexisting with our own. This separate reality can range in size from a small geographic region to an entire new universe, or several universes forming a multiverse. While the terms "Parallel universe" and "alternate reality" are generally synonymous and can be used interchangeably in most cases, there is sometimes an additional connotation implied with the term "alternate reality" that implies that the reality is a variant of our own. The term "parallel universe" is more general, without any connotations implying a relationship (or lack thereof) with our own universe.

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[edit] Introduction

Fantasy has long borrowed the idea of “another world” from myth, legend and religion. Heaven, Hell, Olympus, Valhalla are all “alternate universes” different from the familiar material realm. Modern fantasy often presents the concept as a series of planes of existence where the laws of nature differ, allowing magical phenomena of some sort on some planes. This concept was also found in ancient Hindu mythology, in texts such as the Puranas, which expressed an infinite number of universes, each with its own gods.<ref>Carl Sagan, Placido P D'Souza (1980s). Hindu cosmology's time-scale for the universe is in consonance with modern science.</ref><ref>Subhash Kak (2005). Science in Ancient India (p. 10). In S. R. Sridhar, N. K. Mattoo, Ananya: A portrait of India. AIA: New York, 1997 (p. 399-420).</ref><ref>Dick Teresi (2002). Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - from the Babylonians to the Maya.</ref> In other cases, in both fantasy and science fiction, a parallel universe is a single other material reality, and its co-existence with ours is a rationale to bring a protagonist from the author's reality into the fantasy's reality, such as in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Or this single other reality can invade our own, as when Margaret Cavendish's English heroine sends submarines and "birdmen" armed with "fire stones" back through the portal from the Blazing World to Earth and wreaks havoc on England's enemies. In dark fantasy or horror the parallel world is often a hiding place for unpleasant things, and often the protagonist is forced to confront effects of this other world leaking into his own, as in most of the work of H.P. Lovecraft and the Doom computer game series. In such stories, the nature of this other reality is often left mysterious, known only by its effect on our own world.

Often the alternate worlds theme in science fiction is framed by postulating that every historical event spawns a new universe for every possible outcome, resulting in a number of alternate histories. This literary interpretation is sometimes rooted in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics formulated by the physicist Hugh Everett, an alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation originally formulated by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. (See: multiverse.) This kind of alternate universe is often the backdrop of stories involving time travel and is often used to rationalize the logical paradoxes that arise when an author allows characters to travel backward in time. (see: grandfather paradox) The concept also arises outside the framework of quantum mechanics, as is found in Jorge Luis Borges' short story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ("The Garden of Forking Paths"), published in 1941 before the many-worlds interpretation had been invented. In the story, a Sinologist discovers a manuscript by a Chinese writer where the same tale is recounted in several ways, often contradictory, and then explains to his visitor (the writer's grandson) that his relative conceived time as a "garden of forking paths", where things happen in parallel in infinitely branching ways. While this is a common treatment in SF, it is by no means the only presentation of the idea, even in hard science fiction. Sometimes the parallel universe bears no historical relationship to any other world; as in the novel Raft by Stephen Baxter, which posits a reality where the gravitational constant is much larger than in our universe.

It should be noted that the division between science fiction and fantasy becomes fuzzier than usual when dealing with stories that explicitly leave the universe we are familiar with, especially when our familiar universe is portrayed as a subset of a multiverse. Picking a genre becomes less a matter of setting, and more a matter of theme and emphasis; the parts of the story the author wishes to explain and how they are explained. Narnia is clearly a fantasy, and the TV series Sliders is clearly science fiction, but works like the World of Tiers series tend to occupy a much broader middle ground.

[edit] Uses in science fiction

[edit] Other dimensions

Robert A. Heinlein, in The Number of the Beast, postulates a six-dimensional multiverse.

While technically incorrect, and looked down upon by hard science-fiction fans and authors, the idea of another “dimension” has become synonymous with the term “parallel universe”. The usage is particularly common in movies, television and comic books and much less so in modern prose science fiction.

In written science fiction, “new dimensions” more commonly — and more accurately — refer to additional coordinate axes, beyond the three spatial axes with which we are familiar. By proposing travel along these extra axes, which are not normally perceptible, the traveler can reach worlds that are otherwise unreachable and invisible. One of the first works of modern science fiction, The Time Machine by H. G. Wells used time as an additional “dimension” in this sense, taking the four-dimensional model of classical physics and interpreting time as a spatial dimension in which humans could travel with the right equipment.

There are many examples where authors have explicitly created additional spatial dimensions for their characters to travel in, to reach parallel universes. Douglas Adams, in the last book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Mostly Harmless, uses the idea of probability as an extra axis in addition to the classical four dimensions of space and time. Though, according to the novel, they're not really parallel universes at all but only a model to capture the continuity of space, time and probability. Robert A. Heinlein, in The Number of the Beast, postulated a six-dimensional universe. In addition to the three spatial dimensions, he invoked symmetry to add two new temporal dimensions, so there would be two sets of three. Like the fourth dimension of H. G. Wells’ time traveler, these extra dimensions can be traveled by persons using the right equipment.

[edit] Hyperspace

Main article: Hyperspace (science fiction)

Perhaps the most common use of the concept of a parallel universe in science fiction is the concept of hyperspace. Used in science fiction, the concept of “hyperspace” often refers to a parallel universe that can be used as a faster-than-light shortcut for interstellar travel. Rationales for this form of hyperspace vary from work to work, but the two common elements are:

  1. at least some (if not all) locations in the hyperspace universe map to locations in our universe, providing the “entry” and “exit” points for travelers.
  2. the travel time between two points in the hyperspace universe is much shorter than the time to travel to the analogous points in our universe. This can be because of a different speed of light, different speed at which time passes, or the analogous points in the hyperspace universe are just much closer to each other.

Sometimes "hyperspace" is used to refer to the concept of additional coordinate axes. In this model, the universe is thought to be "crumpled" in some higher spatial dimension and that traveling in this higher spatial dimension, a ship can move vast distances in the common spatial dimensions. An analogy is to crumple a newspaper into a ball and stick a needle straight through, the needle will make widely spaced holes in the two-dimensional surface of the paper. While this idea invokes a "new dimension", it is not an example of a parallel universe. It is a more scientifically plausible use of hyperspace. (See wormhole.)

While use of hyperspace is common, it is mostly used as a plot device and thus of secondary importance. While a parallel universe may be invoked by the concept, the nature of the universe is not often explored. So, while stories involving hyperspace might be the most common use of the parallel universe concept in fiction, it is not the most common source of fiction about parallel universes.

[edit] Time travel and alternate history

Main articles: Time travel and Alternate history (fiction)

The most common use of parallel universes in science fiction, when the concept is central to the story, is as a backdrop and/or consequence of time travel. A seminal example of this idea is in Fritz Lieber’s novel, The Big Time where there’s a war across time between two alternate futures each side manipulating history to create a timeline that results into their own world. Time-travelers in fiction often accidentally or deliberately create alternate histories, such as in The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove where the Confederate Army is given the technology to produce AK-47 rifles and ends up winning the American Civil War. The alternate history novel 1632 by Eric Flint explicitly states, albeit briefly in a prologue, that the time travelers in the novel (an entire town from West Virginia) have created a new and separate universe when they're transported into the midst of the thirty years war in 17th century Germany.

The concept of "sideways" time travel is often used to allow characters to pass through many different alternate histories, all descendant from some common branch point. Often worlds that are similar to each other are considered closer to each other in terms of this sideways travel. ie. A universe where World War II ended differently would be “closer” to us than one where Imperial China colonized the New World in the 15th century. H. Beam Piper used this concept, naming it "paratime" and writing a series of stories involving the Paratime Police who regulated travel between these alternate realities as well as the technology to do so. Keith Laumer used the same concept of "sideways" time travel in his 1962 novel Worlds of the Imperium. More recently, Frederik Pohl used the idea in his novel The Coming of the Quantum Cats which is explicitly based on upon a human-scale reading of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, postulating that every historical event spawns a new universe for every possible outcome. The currently running webcomic To Save Her, by Jennifer Diane Reitz, is based on a similar premise, with an alternate version of one of the main characters from Reitz's earlier Unicorn Jelly traveling through "splays." In this work, travel between splays is relatively common, although some, being more technologically advanced than others, are more accustomed to it. It is also revealed that a cataclysmic event of crucial significance to Unicorn Jelly's plot occurs in 80% of the universe's splays, while universe-traveling technology is only available to the last 20%, who are barred by law from entering the "Stormfall" splays.

It can be argued that most modern alternate histories implicitly refer to parallel universes, based on the above reading of quantum theory. However, many of these works are presented as self-contained worlds in and of themselves, and can be read without resort to additional universes being present. For example, outside The Guns of the South, the large part of Turtledove’s work in alternate history makes no reference to any other universes other than the ones in which the stories take place. And Philip K. Dick's classic novel The Man in the High Castle features a universe in which the Axis won World War II, and the only other universe "present" is fictional, in a book whose author imagines an alternate world (different from our own) in which the Allies won. Such stories bear the same relationship to the reader's world as any fantasy (such as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Trilogy) that contradicts the reader's reality. By extension all of fiction in general could, by this reasoning, be occurring in a subcreated "alternate reality."<ref>John H. Timmerman. "Tolkien’s Crucible of Faith: The Sub-Creation". First published June 5, 1974, retrieved October 31, 2006.</ref> While this definition might be useful in some critical contexts[citation needed] a more generally useful definition restricts the term to fiction where there are alternate realities presented in the work itself.

[edit] Uses in fantasy

[edit] Stranger in a strange land

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Fantasy authors often want to bring characters from the author's (and the reader's) reality into their created world. Before the mid-20th Century, this was most often done by hiding fantastic worlds within hidden parts of the author's own universe. Characters in the author's world could board a ship and find themselves on a fantastic island, as Jonathan Swift does in Gulliver's Travels or in the 1949 novel Silverlock by John Myers Myers, or be sucked up into a tornado and land in Oz, or go down a rabbit hole and end up in Wonderland. These "lost world" stories can be seen as geographic equivalents of a "parallel universe", as the worlds portrayed are separate from our own, and hidden to everyone except those who take the difficult journey there. The geographic "lost world" can blur into a more explicit "parallel universe" when the fantasy realm overlaps a section of the "real" world, but is much larger inside than out, as in Robert Holdstock's novel Mythago Wood.

After the mid-20th Century, perhaps influenced by ideas from science fiction, perhaps because exploration had made many places on the map too clear to write "Here there be dragons", many fantasy worlds became completely separate from the author's world. A common trope is a portal or artifact that connects worlds together, prototypical examples being the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or the sigil in James Branch Cabell's The Cream of the Jest. In Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, Chihiro Ogino and her parents walk through a long tunnel into the spirit world. The main difference between this type of story and the "lost world" above, is that the fantasy realm can only be reached by certain people, or at certain times, or after following certain rituals, or with the proper artifact.

In some cases, physical travel is not even possible, and the character in our reality travels in a dream or some other altered state of consciousness. Examples include the Dream Cycle stories by H. P. Lovecraft or the Thomas Covenant stories of Stephen R. Donaldson. Often, stories of this type have as a major theme the nature of reality itself, questioning if the dream-world can have the same "reality" as the waking world. Science fiction often employs this theme (usually without the dream-world being "another" universe) in the ideas of cyberspace and virtual reality.

[edit] Between the worlds

Most stories in this mold simply transport a character from the real world into the fantasy world where the bulk of the action takes place. Whatever gate is used (such as the tollbooth in The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster) is left behind for the duration of the story, until the end, and then only if the protagonists will return

However, in a few cases the interaction between the worlds is an important element, so that the focus is not on one world or the other, but on both, and their interaction. After Rick Cook introduced a computer programmer into a high fantasy world, his wizardry series steadily acquired more interactions between this world and ours. In Aaron Allston's Doc Sidhe our "grim world" is paralleled by a "fair world" where the elves live and history echoes ours. A major portion of the plot deals with preventing a change in interactions between the worlds. Margaret Ball, in No Earthly Sunne, depicts the interaction of our world with Faerie, and the efforts of the Queen of Faerie to deal with the slow drifting apart of Earth and Faerie. Poul Anderson depicts Hell as a parallel universe in Operation Chaos, and the need to transfer equivalent amounts of mass between the worlds explains why a changeling is left for a kidnapped child.

Multiple worlds, rather than a pair, increase the importance of the relationships. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there are only our world and Narnia, but in other of C. S. Lewis's works, there are hints of other worlds, and in The Magician's Nephew, the Wood between the Worlds shows many possibilities, and the plot is governed by transportation between worlds, and the effort to right problems stemming from them. In Andre Norton's Witch World, begun with a man from Earth being transported to this world, gates frequently lead to other worlds — or come from them. While an abundance of illusions, disguises, and magic that repells attention make certain parts of Witch World look like parallel worlds, some are clearly parallel in that time runs differently in them, and such gates pose a repeated problem in Witch World.

Roger Zelazny in his Chronicles of Amber series presents an infinite array of universes that are "shadows" between Order and Chaos

[edit] Fantasy multiverses

The idea of a multiverse is as fertile a subject for fantasy as it is for science fiction, allowing for epic settings and godlike protagonists. Among the most epic and far-ranging fantasy "multiverses" is that of Michael Moorcock. Like many authors after him, Moorcock was inspired by the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, saying:

It was an idea in the air, as most of these are, and I would have come across a reference to it in New Scientist (one of my best friends was then editor) ... [or] physicist friends would have been talking about it. ... Sometimes what happens is that you are imagining these things in the context of fiction while the physicists and mathematicians are imagining them in terms of science. I suspect it is the romantic imagination working, as it often does, perfectly efficiently in both the arts and the sciences.[citation needed]

Unlike many science-fiction interpretations, Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories go far beyond alternate history to include mythic and sword and sorcery settings as well as some worlds more similar to our own. However, the Eternal Champion himself is incarnate in all of them.

Roger Zelazny used a mythic cosmology in his Chronicles of Amber series. His protagonist is a member of the royal family of Amber, whose members represent a godlike pantheon ruling over a prototypical universe that represents Order. All other universes are increasingly distorted "shadows" of it, ending finally at the other extreme, Chaos, which is the complete negation of the prototype. Travel between these "shadow" universes is only possible by beings descended from the blood of this pantheon. Those "of the blood" can walk through Shadow, imagining any possible reality and then walk to it, making their environment more similar to their desire as they go. It is argued between the characters whether these "shadows" even exist before they're imagined by a member of the royal family of Amber, or if the "shadows'" existence can be seen as an act of godlike creation.

In the World of Tiers novels by Philip José Farmer, the idea of godlike protagonists is even more explicit. The background of the stories is a multiverse where godlike beings have created a number of pocket universes that represent their own desires. Our own world is part of this series, but interestingly our own universe is revealed to be much smaller than it appears, ending at the edge of the solar system.

But even works that deal with lesser beings, the structure of the multiverse may be significiant. Piers Anthony depicts two worlds in the Apprentice Adept series, the SF Proton and the fantasy Phaze, such that every person born in either world has a physical duplicate on the other world. Only when one duplicate has died can the other cross between the worlds.

[edit] Fictional universe as alternate universe

There are many examples of the meta-fictional idea of having the author's created universe (or any author's universe) rise to the same level of "reality" as the universe we're familiar with. The theme is present in works as diverse as Myers' Silverlock and Heinlein’s Number of the Beast. Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp took the character Harold Shea in the Incompleat Enchanter series through the worlds of Norse myth, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and the Kalevala— without ever quite settling whether writers created these parallel worlds by writing these works, or received impressions from the worlds and wrote them down. In an interlude set in "Xanadu", a character claims that the universe is dangerous because the poem went unfinished, but whether this was his misapprehension or not is not established.

Some fictional approaches definitively establish the independence of the parallel world, sometimes by having the world differ from the book's account; other approaches have works of fiction create and affect the parallel world: L. Sprague de Camp's Solomon's Stone, taking place on an astral plane, is populated by the daydreams of mundane people, and in Rebecca Lickiss's Eccentric Circles, an elf is grateful to Tolkien for transforming elves from dainty little creatures. These stories often place the author, or authors in general, in the same position as Zelazny's characters in Amber. Questioning, in a literal fashion, if writing is an act of creating a new world, or an act of discovery of a pre-existing world.

Occasionally, this approach becomes self-referential, treating the literary universe of the work itself as explicitly parallel to the universe where the work was created. Stephen King's seven-volume Dark Tower series hinges upon the existence of multiple parallel worlds, many of which are King's own literary creations. Ultimately the characters become aware that they are only "real" in King's literary universe, and even travel to a world — twice — in which (again, within the novel) they meet Stephen King and alter events in the real Stephen King's world outside of the books.

[edit] Elfland

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Elfland, or Faerie, the otherworldly home not only of elves and fairies but goblins, trolls, and other folkloric creatures, has an ambiguous appearance in folklore.

On one hand, the land often appears to be continuous to ordinary land. Thomas the Rhymer might, on being taken by the Queen of Faerie, be taken on a road like one leading to Heaven or Hell:

'O see ye not yon narrow road,
So think beset with thorns and briers?
That is that path of righteousness,
Tho after it but few enquires.

'And see not ye that braid braid road
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho some call it the road to heaven.

'And see not ye that bonny road,
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.

However, others have found fairies and elves with greater ease. Sir Orfeo discovered the king who had kidnapped his wife by wandering in wilderness. Others have found them in elf hills near the homes, which digging could violate. They have been found in fairy circles, dancing in apparently ordinary woods, or riding through ordinary lands.

While sometimes folklore seems to show fairy intrusion into human lands — "Tam Lin" does not show any otherworldly aspects about the land in which the confrontation takes place — at other times the otherworldly aspects are clear. Most frequently, time can flow differently for those trapped by the fairy dance than in the lands they come from; although, in an additional complication, it may only be an appearance, as many returning from Faerie, such as Oisín, have found that time "catches up" with them as soon as they have contact with ordinary lands.

Fantasy writers have taken up the ambiguity. Some writers depict the land of the elves as a full-blown parallel universe, with portals the only entry — as in Josepha Sherman's Prince of the Sidhe series or Esther Friesner's Elf Defense — and others have depicted it as the next land over, possibly difficult to reach for magical reasons — Robin McKinley's "The Stolen Princess" in The Door in the Hedge or Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter. In some cases, the boundary between Elfland and more ordinary lands is not fixed. Not only the inhabitants but Faerie itself can pour into more mundane regions.

[edit] Other media

[edit] Television

The idea of parallel universes have received treatment in a number of television series, usually as a single story or episode in a more general science fiction or fantasy storyline.

The most widely known and imitated example is the original Star Trek episode entitled Mirror, Mirror. The episode introduced an alternate version of the Star Trek universe where the main characters were barbaric and cruel to the point of being evil.

The concept of an "evil" alternate universe has been a subject ripe for parody, even featured in the series South Park in the episode "Spookyfish" where the "evil" universe double of Cartman, the most obnoxious character, is pleasant and agreeable. Another humorous take on the multiverse concept comes from an episode of the animated series Futurama where the cast travels between "Universe A" and "Universe 1" via boxes containing each universe. After the obligatory argument between alternate versions of the characters over which ones were "evil", they then travel to numerous other parallel universes for brief periods, such as "Hippie Universe", "Robot Universe", and "Eyeless Universe". The BBC TV Series, Red Dwarf offers several humorous takes on the concept that don't involve an evil twin joke, including one episode where women are the dominant gender (Nellie Armstrong was the first person on the moon, and Wilma Shakespeare wrote great plays such as Rachel III and The Taming of the Shrimp), and another where Arnold Rimmer becomes the far more dashing and debonaire Ace Rimmer.

A more fantasy-oriented example is from the 1960s fantasy/horror soap opera Dark Shadows, which introduced the concept of "parallel time" when the main character, Barnabas, witnesses unexplainable changes in a closed off part of his family's house. During one of these changes, he becomes trapped for a time in a parallel world.

Less commonly, television series will use parallel universes as an on-going subplot. This happened as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Enterprise elaborated on the premise of the original series' "Mirror" universe and developed multi-episode story arcs based on the premise. Other examples are the science fiction series Stargate SG-1 and the fantasy/horror series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Interestingly, many of these alternate realities show humankind in desperate peril; in Stargate SG-1 the first encountered parallel reality featured Earth being overwhelmed by an unstoppable Goa'uld onslaught, while in Buffy, the vampires had overrun Sunnydale and Buffy and Angel were both killed trying to prevent them from massacring the human populace. When used as a subplot like this, the parallel/alternate realities often are worse than the "main" storyline's universe. This can be seen as influence from Star Trek, establishing the idea of an "evil" mirror universe, or as the writers using the device to show what is at stake in the main universe by portraying the worst that could happen or the consequences if the protagonists fail. The latter could also be seen as the point of the alternate reality portrayed in the movie It's a Wonderful Life (see below).

The original Doctor Who series occasionally featured parallel worlds. Examples include Inferno (1970), where Great Britain has been a republic since 1943 (the Royal Family having been executed) and is ruled by a totalitarian regime, and the 1980-1981 "E-space" trilogy of episodes (Full Circle, State of Decay, and Warriors' Gate). The second series of the 2005 revival of the show made frequent use of the concept beginning with Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel, postulating a parallel world where Britain also has republican status and is run by a President, Zeppelins patrol the sky, and an alternate race of Cybermen are created. Since the Time War, travel between parallel universes is supposedly near-impossible, but a breach between the universes makes frequent visits easy in the second series finale Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. These visits cause increasing damage to the universes and the breach is permanently sealed.

Other examples of series using a parallel universe or universes as a central element of the series itself include the short-lived 1980s series Otherworld which transported a family from our world to an alternate Earth; and Sliders, where the characters travel across a series of "alternate" Earths, each different from their own in some way, trying to get back to their home universe.

[edit] Movies

The most famous treatment of the alternate universe concept in film could be considered the The Wizard of Oz, which portrays a parallel world, famously separating the magical realm of the Land of Oz from the mundane world by filming it in Technicolor while filming the scenes set in Kansas in sepia.

A later example is the Frank Capra movie, It's a Wonderful Life where the main character George Bailey is shown by a guardian angel the city of Pottersville, which was George Bailey's hometown of Bedford Falls as it would have been if he had never existed. Another notable depiction of a parallel universe in movies is the second film in the Back to the Future trilogy (1985, 1989) by Robert Zemeckis, starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, showing an accidentally created alternate present and future. Like It's a Wonderful Life, The Big Time, and many other time travel stories using this conceit, it is clear that these alternate presents/futures are mutually exclusive with the protagonists' own — so, strictly speaking, the universes aren't parallel in that they cannot co-exist, rather they oscillate between one or the other.

Another common use of the theme is as a prison for villains or demons. The idea is used in the first two Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve where Kryptonian villains were sentenced to the Phantom Zone from where they eventually escaped. An almost exactly parallel use of the idea is presented in the campy cult film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, where the "8th dimension" is essentially a "phantom zone" used to imprison the villainous Red Lectroids. Uses in horror films include the 1986 film From Beyond (based on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name) where a scientific experiment induces the experimenters to perceive aliens from a parallel universe, with bad results. The 1987 John Carpenter film Prince of Darkness is based on the premise that the Christian Satan is actually an alien being that is the son of something even more evil and powerful, trapped in another universe. The protagonists accidentally free "Satan", who then attempts to release his "father."

Some films present parallel realities that are actually different contrasting versions of the narrative itself. Commonly this motif is presented as different points of view revolving around a central (but sometimes unknowable) "truth", the seminal example being Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. Conversely, often in film noir and crime dramas, the alternate narrative is a fiction created by a central character, intentionally — as in The Usual Suspects — or unintentionally — as in Angel Heart. Less often, the alternate narratives are is given equal weight in the story, making them truly alternate universes, such as in the German film Run Lola Run, the short-lived British West End musical Our House and the British film Sliding Doors.

Recent films that have more explicitly explored parallel universes are: the 2001 cult movie Donnie Darko, which deals with what it terms a "tangent universe" that erupts from our own universe; Super Mario Bros. (1993) has the eponymous heroes cross over into a parallel universe ruled by humanoids who evolved from dinosaurs; Groundhog Day (1993), starring Bill Murray, in which Murray's character relives the same day over and over, which, barring simple time travel, can be explained by his being forced into an parallel universe that differs only by the time of one day; The One (2001) starring Jet Li, in which there is a complex system of realities in which Jet Li's character is a police officer in one universe and a serial killer in another, who travels to other universes to destroy versions of himself, so that he can become 'the one'; and FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions (2004), the main character runs away from a totalitarian nightmare, and he enters into a cyber-afterlife alternative reality.

[edit] Comic books

Parallel universes in modern comics have become particularly rich and complex, in large part due to the continual problem of continuity faced by the major two publishers, Marvel Comics and DC Comics. The two publishers have used the multiverse concept to fix problems arising from integrating characters from other publishers into their own canon, and from having major serial protagonists having continuous histories lasting, as in the case of Superman, over 60 years. Additionally, both publishers have used new alternate universes to re-imagine their own characters. (See Multiverse (DC Comics) and Multiverse (Marvel Comics))


[edit] Music

There is a song by Red Hot Chilli Peppers entitled "Parallel Universe".

[edit] Games

A small part of EarthBound involves traveling to Moonside, an alternate universe version of the town of Fourside.

There is a secret level named "Out of this dimension" in the game Star Fox. The level is somewhat bizarre and confusing, with a slot machine boss waiting in the end.

The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game has a thoroughly developed system of planes of existence. A popular campaign setting for the game, Planescape, centers around travelling between these planes. Ravenloft, a gothic horror setting for Dungeons & Dragons, is based entirely in a single demiplane.

In the Magic: The Gathering, every plane is part of a multiverse. What effects one plane, may ultimately affect others, such as what happened when a great devastation occurred on the main plane, Dominaria. All the planes around were locked in a bubble, called the Shard, where no one could get in or out.

In the computer game Myst a people known as D'ni colonized Earth from another universe, and kept traveling to other universes (known as Ages) through Linking Books. According to their cosmology, each universe is a leaf of the Terokh Jeruth, the Tree of Possibilities. Myst also includes the use of Trap Books as empty universes for storing criminals, although they were later retconned to be complete universes of their own, called Prison Ages.

The Kingdom Hearts series also implements the idea of multiple worlds, ranging from the Destiny Islands to Halloween Town (from The Nightmare Before Christmas) to Port Royal (from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl).

The Squaresoft game Chrono Cross involves the world being split into two different dimensions, due to an accident involving the fate of a boy named Serge.

The 3do series Army Men constantly has its characters jumping from the plastic dimension to ours.

In the computer game Red Alert 2, or more specifically, its expansion, Yuri's Revenge, the player must utilise a time machine and travel back in time, to a parallel universe.

The Half-Life series strongly features the concept of parallel universes. In the original game, the player visits a 'border world' named Xen. In Half-Life 2, Earth has been taken over by an imperialistic, inter-dimensional alien race known as the Combine.

The Silent Hill horror video game series incorportates a concept of parallel worlds that are related to main character's emotions, memories, fears and other projections of his or her subconsiousness. The most common distinction is between the normal world (as the world is seen in reality) and the evil world (as the world is seen when it is devoured by evil powers). Characters are switching (i.e. altering) between these two worlds numerous times during the game's plot. There is a number of ways in which a character may swich between the worlds (for example, he or she may experience a pounding headache and, after this event, he or she "wakes up" in the evil world). The architecture of the evil world (also refered as an alternative world) is basically the same as the one of the normal, "real" world (for instance, a hospital in the normal world has its equivalent in the evil world). However, images of the evil world demostrate how the real world would look like if it would be devoured by evil powers (for example, a hospital in the real world is no longer a hospital in the evil world - it is in fact a decent torture block full of hellish images of pain and suffering).

[edit] List of fiction employing parallel universes/alternate realities

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy certain standards for completeness. Revisions and sourced additions are welcome.

[edit] Books

  • Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote The Blazing World (1666), a book far ahead of its time, in which the heroine passes through a portal near the North Pole to a world with different stars in the sky and talking animals. Although Cavendish never came up with the idea of a multiverse, she did have the idea of a single alternate world down pat.
  • Murray Leinster's story "Sidewise in Time" (1933), showing different parts of the Earth somehow occupied by different parallel universes, was influential in science fiction.
  • H. Beam Piper, the author of the Paratime series, wrote several stories dealing with alternate realities based on points of divergence far in the past. The stories are usually written from the perspective of a law-enforcement outfit from a parallel reality which is charged to protect the secret of temporal transposition.
  • Fredric Brown's "What Mad Universe" recounts the adventures of a science-fiction editor of the late 1940s who is thrown into a parallel universe that reflects the fantasies of his most annoying letter-to-the-editor writer (an adolescent male, naturally).
  • Isaac Asimov's novel The Gods Themselves depicts scientists in our universe who find a way to "import" small amounts of matter from a universe having different physical laws, with unforeseen consequences.
  • Stephen King's series The Dark Tower has doors that send travelers to different parallel Earths, or, as termed in the story, different levels of the Tower.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast is focused around a 'time machine' that also proves to be able to travel sideways and other directions in time, allowing for crossing into other realities, even ones previously considered fictional by the protagonists.
  • S. M. Stirling's novel Conquistador is based on travel between parallel universes, with a group of 20th century Americans having found a means to secretly colonize a world where civilization never advanced past the classical era.
  • The Wheel of Time series features not only one cyclic universe, but many. In one particular instance, Rand al'Thor's, the main protagonist's, mind is deluged by possibilities for his own life, and in all of these possibilities he dies before defeating the Dark One and is taunted by him a moment before death. Also in the Wheel of Time universe, Tel'aran'rhiod, the world of dreams, is said to touch this world and also many other worlds. Dreamers, those who walk the dream and can control the world of dreams to some extent, can go to a place where they see a vast darkness filled with countless pinpricks of light. These pinpricks of light are said to represent not only the dreams of those sleeping in this world but also the dreams of sleepers from other parallel worlds.
  • Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci series revolves around the duty of the Chrestomanci to regulate magic in the twelve related worlds. These worlds have alternate histories, in which some people may exist only in a few worlds. It is necessary that the Chrestomanci must exist in only one, because this gives him the nine lives needed for his role. Other works of Jones' that include parallel universes: The Magid series; Deep Secret and the The Merlin Conspiracy in which the multiverse is shaped like an infinity sign and contains Ayewards and Naywards. The Derkholm series: Dark Lord of Derkholm and its sequel Year of the Griffin in which Pilgrims come from a parallel world for Mr. Chesney's offworld tours. In Howl's Moving Castle, though it does not play a major part in the plot, the wizard Howl is actually from our world. In A Tale of Time City, the main character, Vivian, is kidnapped and taken to Time City, a city out of time and space. Along with her new friends and past kidnappers Jonathan and Sam, she hunts through time and space for the polarites that are gradually being stolen. In A Sudden Wild Magic a group of benevolent witches set out to stop the magicians of Arth who steal ideas, technology, and innovations from Earth. In Hexwood, the machine Bannus sucks potential Reigners from all over the universe into the Wood. In The Homeward Bounders Jamie is made into a Homeward Bounder by "Them" which means he must constantly travel from world to world until he finds his home again.
  • John DeChancie's Castle Perilous series tells of a huge magical castle containing portals to 144,000 worlds, including Earth.
  • Stephen R. Donaldson's Mordant's Need series, which includes The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through, follows a heroine who can pass into another world through mirrors.
  • H.G. Wells wrote what is apparently the first explicit paratime novel, Men Like Gods (1923), complete with a multiverse theory and a paratime machine.
  • In James P. Hogan's Paths to Otherwhere, scientists at the Los Alamos Laboratory create a machine QUADAR which allow them to swap conscious with people in parallel universes. They explore various parallel universes.
  • In Kia Asamiya's manga novel Space Battleship Nadesico, written alongside the series Martian Successor Nadesico but altering severely as the course of the story runs, the Jupiterians that are attacking Earth come from a parallel universe, the portal of which is in the red storm visible on Jupiter as a red spot. In their world, Japan won World War II, and because of their strong religious Shinto beliefs, their Gods did not die out, and they were able to use this magic to help strengthen their technology. However, their sun died out prematurely, and so they have come to our world to steal the energy from our sun to save their world.
  • Sergey Lukyanenko's novel Rough Draft takes place across the multiverse of at least 22 worlds (it was implied that there were actually more worlds that haven't been discovered yet) linked together by a series of tower-like transfer points.
  • I, Q is a 2000 Star Trek novel by Peter David and John de Lancie in which God attempts to destroy the multiverse in a large multi-universe maelstrom which the protagonists attempt to stop from within a newly created universe caused by the maelstrom.
  • In D.J. MacHale's Pendragon series there are ten different parallel universes (including our own), called territories, that are part of Halla, which is described as being every time and place that ever existed. Certain people, called Travelers, are able to go between the territories through portals known as Flumes. It is claimed that by traveling through a Flume, Travelers land on their destination territory exactly when they need to be there, suggesting time travel.
  • In Robert J Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax series a parallel historical universe exists in which it was Neanderthals not Homo sapiens who survived to become the dominant species. In a quantum physics experiment gone wrong a Neanderthal scientist is accidentally transported into the universe of Homo sapiens. Eventually a portal between the two universes is established and travelling to an alternate universe becomes a controlled event.

[edit] Television

  • Sliders dealt with a group of mostly-unwilling travellers who ended up "sliding" between various parallel Earths in an attempt to find their way back to their own universe. Plots included an Earth in which the population is controlled through a lottery, an Earth where most of the males were killed by germ warfare, an Earth where dinosaurs are still alive, and an Earth in which the population have been turned into flesh-eating zombies. According to a main character Quinn, there were an infinite number of universes where different single decisions were different and even a world where the Earth formed differently and rotated around the Sun slower, slowing down that timeline.
  • Star Trek featured the recurring mirror universe, a dark reflection of the normal universe in which the regular characters are twisted, self-serving and more than willing to resort to murder. The mirror universe was introduced in the original Star Trek, and it also appeared in Enterprise, but was featured most often in Deep Space Nine.
  • The Doctor Who serial Inferno features the Doctor travelling to a parallel universe. There, the Doctor finds his friend the Brigadier is part of a despotic government that violently overthrew the monarchy. The episode Rise of the Cybermen involves the TARDIS getting stuck in a parallel London in which dying genius John Lumic has created the emotionless Cybermen as a means of prolonging human life. In Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, Daleks, Cybermen and members of the human race travel between alternate parallel Earths.
  • Joss Whedon's cult television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, have featured a number of parallel universes — including a world in which most of the regular cast were either dead or vampires, as well as the often-mentioned but never-seen World Without Shrimp — bridging the gap with magic.
  • The anime Digimon features an alternative perceived reality called the Digital World. The Digital World is created as a result of the Earth's electronic network, with everything being made up of data instead of matter. Also, certain seasons, games, and manga are set in a different parallel Earth, with its own version of a Digital World.
  • The show Stargate SG1 has had several episodes dealing with parallel universes. The first had Daniel Jackson finding a mirror looking device, known as the Quantum Mirror, where by touching the "mirror" he was taken to a parallel universe in which things hadn't gone so well compared to his reality. Another Episode has a Samantha Carter and a character killed off in the second episode of the show come through the mirror to request help from the show's normal reality. With the end of that show the Quantum Mirror was destroyed. The latest episode, "Ripple Effect", dealing with alternate realities has a lot of different SG1 teams coming through the same Gate.
  • In Charmed, there exists an alternate dimension where all the evil are good and all the good are evil. The reason for this given that there has to be balance in the universe, so there can never be an area where everything is all good and one where it is all bad as this would affect the grand design of life. So for every good thing that the Charmed Ones do for good in this world, it is done for evil in another to keep things balanced. Mostly, everything occurs exactly the same way, mirroring the real world. Some differences are that all Whitelighters are Darklighters and vice versa, and that The Underworld is an Eden-like paradise. The Demon of Fear is the Demon of Hope, and Wyatt Halliwell faces a future in which he turns good one day as opposed to one where he turns evil. Some figures, such as the morally ambigious Gideon, remain largely similar.
  • The anime Buraku Burondo also uses multiple dimensions (parallel universes) as part of its storyline. Most main characters all come from other universes, but end up in the same.
  • The anime Rockman EXE Beast involves another dimension parallel to earth named Beyondard, in which there are parallel versions of the characters in the world, where a war between the antagonists Falzar and Greiga are fighting over control. Many Navis from Earth are in this world serving as the lower antagonists for the series, preferring to be called by Zoans (strangely, many of the Zoans were already deleted on Earth--a concept used by Fullmetal Alchemist: Conquerer of Shamballa), then their real name. These Navis had beastings forms in which they would change shape when in a pinch. In this world, Navis could be summoned within Beyondard without the need of a dimensional area, due to its strange environment; ironically, Crossfusion would drain energy more than give.

[edit] Comics

  • In Zenith: Phase Three, superheroes from many parallel universes must band together to defend their worlds.
  • in Yu-Gi-Oh's english version, "Shadow Games" happen in an Alternate Reality, known as the "Shadow Realm".
  • Alternate universes are often used as an explanation for crossovers between different companies' characters.
  • The Marvel Comics series Exiles details the adventures of dimension-hopping band of superheroes from oher alternate universes in the Marvel Multiverse.
  • Jenny Everywhere is an open source webcomic character, being able to 'shift' between realities. Each universe has its own Jenny Everywhere, so she is literally everywhere (that implies other living persons being solely unique). In some stories Everywheres from different universes will meet each other.

[edit] Games

  • The video game Metroid Prime 2: Echoes features the planet Aether, which is struck by a meteor. The strange, energetic substance (called Phazon) within the meteor, along with the force of the impact, split the planet's reality into light and dark dimensions. Samus, the heroine, must travel between the two dimensions, transferring energy back to the light dimension before the two competing worlds destroy one another.
  • In the videogame Chrono Cross (2001), the main character must travel between two dimensions, known as "Home World" (the world from which the main character originates) and "Another World".
  • In the video game Star Ocean: Till the End of Time the characters unknowingly live in a "video game" created by people in another universe called 4D Space. Eventually, the creators of the game see fit to effectively reboot the game server, effectively destroying the universe in the process, however, once the process is complete, the characters find the universe as they know it intact, and all links to 4D space inacessible. Suggesting that by destroying the universe, contact between the two planes of existence was severed, without resulting in the destruction of either plane.
  • The video game The Longest Journey featuers a story about two parallel unvierses, Stark and Arcadia. Stark is a futuristic universe with cyberpunk influences, while Arcadia is a fantastic medieval world.
  • In Final Fantasy X, Tidus is transported from his hometown of Zanarkand into Spira, a land where everything is radically different to him. The other characters explain various things to him, and these explanations are actually aimed at the player. As the game progresses, he finds that Zanarkand was destroyed 1,000 years before the start of the game, and the Zanarkand he is from is a just a dream created by the Fayth, the souls of those who died when the city perished. He finds that he is ultimately no more than a dream, and he disappears at the end of the game.
  • The Half-Life series features a number of parallel universes from which both hostile and friendly alien species originate. One inter-dimensional alien race, the Combine, conquers Earth and attempts to harvest and enslave humanity. Only in Half-Life and its expansion packs, however, does the player ever visit one of these parallel dimensions; the so-called 'border world', Xen.
  • The real-time strategy ParaWorld is set in a parallel dimension discovered by a group of scientists in the 19th century. This new world is periodically connected to ours via natural gateways. In order to cross into that world, one must predict the exact time and location of the opening rift. ParaWorld is a world where electricity does not and cannot exist, and the word "lightning" is foreign to the natives. As such, technology has not gone beyond steam engines. Most tribes, however, prefer to utilize other means of transportation and warfare - dinosaurs. As discovered by three modern-day scientists who are trapped in ParaWorld, dinosaurs never existed on our Earth, and all the bones found by archaeologists have somehow crossed over through the portals. In ParaWorld, however, they exist alongside human tribes, some of which are similar culturally to ours (e.g. Norsemen, Dustriders (Beduins), and Dragon Clans (East Asia)).

[edit] Quotes

But your creating Fancy, thought it fit

To make your World of Nothing, but pure Wit.
Your Blazing-world, beyond the Stars mounts higher,

Enlightens all with a Celestial Fire.
—The Duke of Newcastle, upon the publication of his wife Margaret's The Blazing World (1666),
arguably the first alternate reality story in the English language.

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[edit] References

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  • Clifford A. Pickover (August, 2005). Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes, and the Quest for Transcendence (Discusses parallel universes in a variety of settings, from physics to psychedelic visions to Proust parallel worlds to Bonnet syndrome). Smart Publications. ISBN 1-890572-17-9.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

es:Universo paralelo fr:Univers parallèle he:יקום מקביל nl:Parallel universum ja:パラレルワールド pt:Universo paralelo (ficção) ru:Параллельный мир (фантастика)

sv:Parallella universum

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