“Everything Everywhere All at Once” (dir. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, aka ‘Daniels’ 2022)

Every review everywhere all-of-them agrees on the excellence of this movie, and I’m certainly not going to disagree. It is (maybe) a tad over-long, and in particular the penultimate staircase-up-to-the-bagel-of-doom sequence is over-extended. But the film’s two hours ten minutes running time is so restless, so crammed with action, ideas, visual wit and panache, and the cast do such a great job delivering the material, that the time fair rushes past. Rushes rather frantically and exhaustingly past. But you certainly won’t be bored. It’s an absolutely spanking movie, sometimes literally so.

Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang, wife, mother and small-businesswoman, is in almost every shot, and the movie really stands or falls (or gongfu-leaps or strikes) on her performance. Fortunately, said performance is amazing — capturing at once Evelyn’s determination, her energy, her querulousness, her exhaustion, her ADHD and her many moods. The movie in effect narrates in exteriorised SFnal mode a woman going through both the breakdown of her marriage and personal psychological collapse, and Yeoh does a compelling job with this story. That said, I thought Stephanie Hsu, playing her daughter Joy, delivered in some ways an even more impressive performance, covering the emotional highs and lows of the role with panache, all the time wearing a series of endearingly bonkers Lady Gaga style costumes, whilst also pulling-off a convincing Gen Z sarcastic-nihilistic mode that speaks effectively to today’s generational divide.

Evelyn runs a coin-op launderette but her tax affairs are in disarray, and the movie opens with her and her wimpy husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) porting a pantechnicon-ful of receipts and loose paper to the IRS office. Here Jamie Lee Curtis’s sinister tax officer is looking to wreck Evelyn’s financial life and repossess her business. But actually unwitting Evelyn is the one hope to defeat a multiverse villain threatening to destroy all realities. In the tax office an alt-reality Waymond from a more macho version of the multiverse does a Morpheus-from-The-Matrix act on her, whereupon the movie explodes into a frantic string of settings and worlds, fists furying and kicks flying, as Evelyn first learns the identity of and then confronts the cosmic menace, the story zipping along on and ornamenting its narrative with a series of brilliant, witty, bizarre and ingenious grace-notes.

The through-line, if we are disposed to stop and isolate it for a moment, is maybe a little pat: the importance of family, respecting your elders, accepting your offspring, all the anti-Seinfeld hugging and learning gubbins. There is perhaps a confusion too, over the movie’s moral: viz., that Evelyn has to ‘let her daughter go’. This is styled both as a (healthy) acceptance of Joy’s independence and individuality — her gayness, for instance, acknowledgement of which Evelyn initially resists — and as a more psychopathological desire on Joy’s part to commit suicide, to give up and die. For Evelyn to ‘let go’ in the latter sense would be an abdication of her love and duty for her daughter, surely; where ‘letting go’ in the first sense is a healthy and needful part of mutual growth. Eliding these, as the story seems to me to do, flirts with wrongness. But the movie as a whole is such a blast that it hardly matters.

Anyway I’m not really here to review this film, concerning which you will already have heard many good things, and which you’ve probably already seen. Instead I’m interested in the word ‘multiverse’. This is what Clute, Nicholls and Langford’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says about it:

Its best known early use was in an 1895 speech by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842–1910), collected in his Will to Believe (1897): ‘Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe.’ This was anticipated by the scientist and science writer William Denovan, who in a published letter contributing to debate over planetary motion in our Solar System asserted (of God) that ‘the Great Mechanic presides over a universe, and not merely a cohering multiverse.’ (22 November 1873 Scientific American).

Michael Moorcock reinvented the word for sf in ‘The Blood Red Game’ (May 1963 Science Fiction Adventures), where it stands for the totality of all possible alternate universes or Parallel Worlds. Placing such worlds in the common framework of the multiverse implies the possibility of contact, interaction and travel between alternate realities or Dimensions. This meaning, reinforced by very frequent restatement in Moorcock’s later sf and even more in his Fantasy, is now commonly used in both sf and sf criticism.

This, I suppose, is the consensus. In the words of Michael Wood: ‘the word “multiverse” was coined by William James in 1895, but he was only talking about the one universe that kept failing to get its act together. (The OED says it was first used in its present sense by Michael Moorcock in 1963.)’ Is this right though?

I’d say the original Jamesian sense had already, before Moorcock, come under the pressure of physicists’ and mathmeticians’ speculations to come to mean something more like the modern sense of the word. J A Kennedy’s The Triuneverse: A Scientific Romance (1912) spins a tale of, as its title suggests, three linked cosmoses. Cosmoi. Cosmim. Whatever the correct plural is. Kennedy’s story starts with Earthly astronomers watching as Mars splits in two, afterwards fragmenting into myriad pieces that swarm out and destroy Jupiter and Saturn. Then the sun explodes. Our heroes escape destruction by diverting through an alternate universe, the ‘infratronic’ (that is, smaller than electronic) world, to arrive eventually at Alpha Centauri where life can begin again.

The term Kennedy brackets under his triuneverse concept is “multiverse”. Indeed the book’s opening chapter is called ‘The Multiverse’, and the narrator argues that ‘the Universe displays the organization of the Multiverse, the life of the Organiverse, and the permanance of the Spirituverse’ [204] (hence Triuneverse, you see). A quick Google Books search reveals loads of pre-1963 hits for Multiverse, by no means all Jamesian, as well as plenty of hits for Organiverse and, indeed, Infiniverse.

I’m not trying to rob Moorcock of the credit for reintroducing the term. Kennedy’s is, clearly, an obscure and little-known text, and it’s with Moorcock that the term starts on its jorney to the mainstream, and today’s Star Trek/Spiderman/Doctor Strange ubiquity. But I would insist that pretty much all the story-beats and conventions of ‘The Multiverse’ were in place before Moorcock slapped that moninker on it.

For instance: Sam Merwin’s House of Many Worlds (1951) sends its can-do hero Mack on a rollicking adventure through a sprig of parallel worlds, all accessible via a portal in Florida’s Spindrift Key, for some reason:

Indeed, loads of Pulp SF parallel worlds adventures were published in the 1940s and 1950s.

Raymond Jones’s Renaissance (originally serialized in Astounding, Jul-Oct 1944, later reissued in book form under the title Man of Two Worlds) opens in a utopia called Kronweld. We discover how this Utopia was created: Earth scientists, having discovered time travel, used it to go back and not only kill Hitler, but all the Hitlers: ‘we pointed out what changes there would have been in the world if such as Alexander, Nero, Attila, Hitler, Michoven, Drurila and the hosts like them could have been examined at birth and their criminal tendencies discovered and destroyed without giving them a chance at life.’ [138]. But there’s a hitch. Utopia proves sterile, so the population is maintained by Kronweldians raiding parallel realities and kidnapping their babies. ‘There exist parallel worlds,’ the novel informs us, ‘in which the oscillation rates of the component particles making up their atoms differ’ (the character who tells us this rather dismissively adds: ‘you won’t understand that, neither do I’).

And in Fritz Leiber’s Destiny Times Three (Astounding, March-April 1945: published in book form 1957) our protagonist Thorn rattles quickly through three alternative universes:

In three days he had seen three worlds, and none of them were good. World 3, wrecked by subtronic power, cold battlefield for a hopeless last stand. World 2, warped by paternalistic tyranny, smoldering with hate and boredom. World 1, a utopia in appearance, but lacking real stamina or inward worth, not better than the others — only luckier. [119]

This is merely the tip of the multiverseberg, there being, we are told, an ‘infinitude of infinitude’ of such dimensions. Thorn’s access is provided by a ‘Probability Engine’ super-computer: ‘every point was adjacent to every other point, and so infinity was everywhere, and all paths led everywhere, and only thought could impose order or differentiate’. Leiber’s preferred term for this multiverse is ‘transtime’. It seems to me that might just as easily have caught on as Moorcock’s usage.

So there are multiple multiverses, and vice-versa multi-manyverse transtimes, all before Moorcock dispersed his diverse multiverses in nineteen sixty-three/which is rather late for me.

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Postscript. A couple of reactions to this post online. Here, my mate Rich Puchalsky thinks I’ve got the focus of the (second part of the) post wrong:

Why did Moorcock create a multiverse? Someone who does actual biographically informed criticism can give a real answer, but he is a prolific writer who had written a large number of fantasy and SF novels that used the same ideas but had different characters.

The concept of a multiverse joins all of these books together into a more or less coherent whole. Instead of being scattered books where Moorcock repeats himself with variations, they are retrospectively about different multiversal versions of the Eternal Champion. The Eternal Champion cycle begins (if that is a meaningful term in a multiverse) in the Moorcock book The Eternal Champion, which itself is a fix-up. Notably, the short references to other Moorcock works which make it multiversal only were added at the fix-up stage. Rather than write about the content of the Moorcock multiverse, I’ll mention that as a publishing device it often took fans who read his Elric books and convinced them that the rest of his sprawling, prolific oeuvre was connected to them and that they should read the whole thing. Therefore, the precursor of Moorcock’s multiverse was in an important sense not the various little-known books that used similar ideas, but James Branch Cabell’s Storisende edition, which has many similar qualities

James Branch Cabell was a prolific and very good fantasy writer (although he did not call himself one: he was influenced by earlier genres), who decided to join up his books into one edition, and in the process put in little rewrites to connect them as the Lives of Manuel. Manuel is, basically, The Eternal Champion. His lives are spread out into pseudo-historical eras rather than a multiverse because Cabell saw himself as writing in the style of Walter Scott rather than as with Moorcock in the style of pulp SF or sword-and-sorcery. But the publishing effect was similar. Cabell gathered up everything he’d ever written, including his poetry, into an 18 book limited edition which he convinced a publisher to put out. He supposedly spent a year personally signing every book. More to the point, he not only modified the works slightly, he wrote new introductions for each of them that framed them as part of this overarching work, which did not exist until after most of them were written. The multiverse, then, is a way of restating one’s artistic tics — ideas that someone keeps coming back to, reused stylistic bits — as not repetitions, but as the bones of a work. As such, it’s perfect for contemporary media franchises. Marvel vaguely understands, as an amoeba does, that all of its products seem rather the same, so in makes a TV series Loki in which all of these repetitions are really part of its universe and therefore intended

This is very interesting to me, although I wonder if James Branch Cabell isn’t rather better known on the other side of the Atlantic than over here. But I don’t doubt I should read more of him. Then my old friend Abraham Kawa makes this suggestion: ‘one influential addition to pre-Moorcock multiverses is Gardner Fox’s The Flash Of Two Worlds from 1961, which not only posits parallel timeline earths with variants of people, but posits the notion that one reality’s people experience the others as dreams.’