Interworld

A while ago, I complained about books that reduce the multiverse to a subplot. And now comes Neil Gaiman's new book, which does nothing of the sort. Huzzah!

Interworld, actually coauthored by Gaiman and Michael Reaves, is a young adult novel about a young man who discovers his power to travel between parallel universes. This immediately sweeps him up into the power politics of two interdimensional empires; and of a resistance movement composed entirely of parallel versions of himself.

The cosmology is well-developed and interesting. The concept of an organization made up entirely of alternate selves is fun, but doesn't get as much development as it deserves.

(It's easy enough to see a parallel in close cases: "He's what I would be if I'd grown up in Georgia," for example. But what does it mean to say, "He's what I would be if the human race had evolved from birds"? Can that person be considered a parallel self, or just a person that coincidentally resembles you?)

The book is fun, and you can see bits of Gaimanesque thinking throughout it.

Startling Campaign News

My perennial dark-horse Republican candidate, Mike Huckabee, has just been endorsed by Chuck Norris.

We might as well just move him into the Oval Office right now.

Space... The Final Frontier...

From The Guardian:

'Second Earth' found, 20 light years away

Scientists have discovered a warm and rocky "second Earth" circling a star, a find they believe dramatically boosts the prospects that we are not alone.

The planet is the most Earth-like ever spotted and is thought to have perfect conditions for water, an essential ingredient for life. Researchers detected the planet orbiting one of Earth's nearest stars, a cool red dwarf called Gliese 581, 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra.

Measurements of the planet's celestial path suggest it is 1½ times the size of our home planet, and orbits close to its sun, with a year of just 13 days. The planet's orbit brings it 14 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. But Gliese 581 burns at only 3,000C, half the temperature of our own sun, making conditions on the planet comfortable for life, with average ground temperatures estimated at 0 to 40C. Researchers claim the planet is likely to have an atmosphere. The discovery follows a three-year search for habitable planets by the European Southern Observatory at La Silla in Chile...

So how cool is that?

I vaguely remember Isaac Asimov, in his nonfiction book Extraterrestrial Civilizations, laying out some problems with a planet being close to even a cooler sun. I'll have to go look it up to be sure.

But even so, it's remarkable news.

It's Atropecious!

(But not as much my pun.)

The Television Tropes & Idioms wiki has taken up most of my reading time today. I can't easily account for its fascination; something about the combination of amusement and recognition I get from reading all these entries?

The Multiverse Isn't a Subplot!

Today's book of consideration is James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation; there will be some minor spoilage, I'm afraid. (But only minor!)

The novel begins in an alternate history where the Axis had a very successful World War II. It's now 1975, and America and Australia are the only non-Axis nations left in the world; but it's only a matter of time for them.

So they develop time-travel, planning to go back to the early 1940s and change a few things; and make their world, in the process, very much like the one we live in today. But things are much more complicated than they first appear.

(Here go my minor spoilers!)


The Americans actually stole time-travel from the Nazis; or rather, from the 21st-century renegades who decided they'd prefer a Nazi world to their original history. So ours isn't the first history, or the second, but the third; the original course of history is an idyllic world where Europe reached a better ending to WWI, and averted the bloody course of the late 20th century altogether.

So far, so good. I love time-travel stories. And while I'm skeptical of utopias (something I've been seeing a lot of in Hogan) the neatness of the history-behind-a-history-behind-a-history appealed to my juvenile sense of wonder.

But then things get annoying.

It turns out that changing history doesn't scale forward: the Utopia world and the Nazi world keep going on, regardless of what changes occur in 1940. That's a standard trope of time-travel stories, and it seems to resolve some paradoxes.

But these parallel worlds aren't related to the time-travel changes. They're borne of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in which every possible position of an electron manifests in an entirely different universe. So the time-travellers are never really interacting with their own history at all (I think. But, really, who can tell?)

I don't mind the Many-Worlds Hypothesis; it can certainly be the basis for some fascinating science fiction. But it makes a lousy subplot. It's too big; not just in size, but in implications. It affects everything. Any fair treatment of it will tend to overwhelm any other story the author's trying to tell.

Greg Egan's done some good work with the concept: particularly his brilliant Permutation City, which I hope to review someday soon. But he does this good work by acknowledging the way the multiverse has a radical impact on the basic ideas that we take for granted.

Proteus wasn't a bad novel; and I'm still a sucker for time travel. But this treatment removes the logical paradoxes that are the mainstay of time-travelling fun. With that taken away, it's more like a period piece.

Tonight's Geek Pleasure

Fantasy Bedtime Hour, a public access show in which two nude women lie in bed discussing Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane. They're completely clueless, and it's hilarious watching them try to interpret Donaldson's overpurple prose.

They also have action sequences!

I Have No Comment...

... About the report that Mitt Romney's favorite novel is Battlefield Earth.

Well, maybe just one.

BWA-HAHAHAHAHAHA!