The Multiverse (Five Novels)

Another instalment in my Five Novels series deals with a convention most of us know from movies: the multiverse. Yes, it is the same multiverse we encounter in films like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, TV series such as The Dark, and the sprawling Spiderverse and other superhero franchises. Or maybe, not quite the same…

At its most basic, the multiverse is the notion that everything that can possibly exist, does. We all are familiar with the “what if” sensation: what if we had chosen a different college major, gotten a different job, met a different person? How would have our life unfolded? Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” eloquently describes this sensation.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

But what if you could actually take both roads? Quantum uncertainty principle postulates that the indeterminacy of a particle’s position is resolved, or collapsed, by the act of being observed. Though the math of it is impeccable, the notion is so weird that it has given rise to alternative explanations. Among them is Hugh Everettt’s Many World Hypothesis, first proposed in 1957. It posits that every time an alternative outcome exists, the timeline splits into two to accommodate both possibilities. In other words, the road not taken has actually been taken — in another universe.

But here is a problem. If every choice results in two (or more) equally valid outcomes, then it is not a choice at all. Storytelling is based on the notion that once a decision is made, a road is chosen, then certain consequences follow. A narrative plot follows the protagonist along the singular timeline of causes and effects. But if there is an infinity of such timelines, both choice and agency are meaningless. And of course, infinity is unrepresentable by definition. It follows that the multiverse cannot be the foundation of a narrative. And yet, it obviously is.

In TV and cinematic sprawling franchises, this paradox is disguised by a sort of cancerous growth, in which the proliferation of prequels, sequels, remakes, and so on simply befuddles the audience to the point where they can no longer follow the plot or the absence thereof. But novels, even if they are part of a series, still have to have the Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end. So how does SF cope with the paradox of infinity?

Before I answer this question, I want to point out that the multiverse has to be differentiated from a closely related genre: alternate history or uchronia. That genre explores a single fork in the road, a singular moment of divergence from our history. It is based on one premise of “what if”. What if the Roman Empire never fell? (Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna). What if the South won the American Civil War? (Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee). And the perennial favorite: what if Hitler won World War 2? The latter is so popular that a partial list of novels, movies, TV shows and comics based on this premise in Gavriel Rosenfeld’ s book The World Hitler Never Made runs into thousands. Alternate history, or as it is more respectably known virtual history, is used by professional historians as a form of thought experiment. Neil Fergusson discusses it at length in his seminal Virtual History. But alternate history tames the vertigo of infinity by focusing on a single alternative timeline. Multiverse SF tries to represent all of them or at least, indicate that they exist, by showing us “everything, everywhere, all at once.”

The first multiverse story is Murray Leinster “Sideways in Time” published in 1934 (predating Everett’s theory). In the story, different timelines crash into each other, creating a hybrid mosaic Earth where in some places the Roman Empire never fell, while in others California was taken over by Russia, or South won the Civil War. The protagonist literally travels across histories by walking or riding.

And this is how multiverse narratives escape the paradox of infinity: by spatializing time. In multiverse novels, you can navigate different timelines by moving from place to place. And while infinite space is also impossible to represent, at least voyaging preserves an illusion of choice. By simply stepping into a new history, you exercise some agency over your actions.

But this agency is false. No matter what choice you make, the opposite of it is equally true. And so, the underlying idea of the multiverse is that nothing really matters.

This, of course, is not the kind of message popular literature wants to deliver. And so, in the following five novels, the authors go to great length to present us with a conventional narrative of obstacles overcome, decisions made, and victories (or defeats) finalized, while inevitably conveying the underlying notion of the utter futility of it all.

1. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995–2000). This is probably the best-known multiverse series, though if I wanted to be pedantic, I would classify it as YA fantasy rather than sci-fi. Still, the notion of the multiverse is explicitly addressed in the three novels comprising the trilogy (which has been followed by another trilogy and a couple of novellas, true to form). Lyra moves between the quasi-Edwardian world of The Golden Compass, the first book, to our world, and then several others. As in the next novel on the list, the original conflict is framed as a conflict between a repressive religion and the freedom of multiple timelines/worlds. But in fact, it is only in her own world that Lyra’s choices make any impact. And with prominent fantasy elements, such as spirit familiars, the multiverse of Pullman’s novel feels more like an adventure playground than a true infinity.

2. Tim Lebbon, Coldbrook (2012), This is probably the most intelligent zombie novel ever written. And it is the only one I am aware of that combines zombies and the multiverse. An accident punches a hole into a parallel universe, and the undead “furies” stream through, infecting humanity with a fast-spreading zombie virus. But it turns out this is not an accident. A powerful organization is trying to infect all timelines in order to “prune” the sprawling tree of alternative histories down to one single trunk. I won’t tell you what this organization is, but you can probably guess who is making war on randomness and contingency in the name of the One True Faith. The zombie-infested multiverse here is the end of history, or rather the murder of history by zealots. And while in the last chapter the protagonist makes a fateful decision to turn the zombie plague against its creators, the question remains: what will happen in those timelines in which this decision has not been made?

3. Stan C. Smith Bridgers (2018–2020). This is a long series (six novels, plus a prequel helpfully called Infinity, which is also the name of the main character). In a sense, the author tries to imitate in a narrative form the structure of a TV series or a movie franchise. However, this convention is less successful in a narrative with a single protagonist where the closure must offer some sort of resolution. The premise is that an alien device allows people to cross over into an alternative timeline. At first, the device is used for rich tourists accompanied by specially trained guides (bridgers of the title). But once it turns out that the use of the device actually destroys our planet, a scramble for a habitable world ensues. While some of the worlds Infinity and her friends explore are very entertaining, populated by intelligent species descended from birds or lemurs, for example, the main question is frankly asked by Infinity herself:

“I’ve been thinking about this whole effort. I know the idea is to save the human species from extinction. But humans still exist in an infinite number of other universes, so does it really matter?”

The answer is: no, it really does not.

4. Tim Pratt, Doors of Sleep (2021). The protagonist Zaxony Delatree who comes from an advanced version of our Earth acquires the unwanted ability to jump to an alternative universe every time he falls asleep. Having picked up an adversary named the Lector who is literally hungry for Zax’s blood — the miraculous potion that confers this ability — most of the novel is spent with Zax and the Lector playing catch-me-if you-can across infinity. But the problem is that while the worlds Zax explores are very colorful, eventually their endless variety breeds anomie. Lector’s futile attempt to conquer the multiverse is a proof that unlimited freedom can be destructive precisely because it is unlimited:

He would argue that every world and every life was insignificant when considered against the span of the infinite…but nothing mattered against the span of the infinite, so if you wanted to care about anything at all, you had to care about small things (232).

But what if you don’t want to care about small things? What if you want to have a project that makes a real difference? The novel leaves the question wisely unanswered.

M.R. Carey, Infinity Gate (2023). I loved Carey’s zombie utopia The Girl with All the Gifts. But Infinity Gate is a tough novel to love. For one, it is very confusing, with multiple characters hopping across different timelines. “Hopping” here is meant literally because, first, there is a device that does just that; and second, one of these characters belongs to an intelligent species descendant from rabbits. Carey does take the notion of the multiverse seriously, and so his sprawling cast of interacting characters, human, quasi-human, and AI, is meant to evoke the vastness of it. But since the reader can hardly keep track of their entangled plot lines, Carey employs a particularly annoying narrator: an omniscient AI who breaks away from action at random and explains or rather lectures on what the characters are doing, thinking, and feeling. Omniscient narrators are irritating even in Jane Austen novels, let alone in sci-fi, especially when they are supposed to be literally godlike but only sound like the worst university professor ever.