I’ve just finished listening to the audiobook version of Infinity Gate: Book One of the Pandominium by R. Carey. Without spoiling anything for potential readers (and I do highly recommend the book and especially the audio version) the novel is driven by a conceit common to many fictional worlds constructed around the idea of a multi-verse—basically, that some worlds in the multi-verse perceive other worlds in the multi-verse as not quite real.
In William Gibson’s The Peripheral, the alternate threads created by time-forks are called “stubs.” In R. Carey’s novel the parallel universes not yet part of the Pandominium (something like a federation of connected parallel universes) are “the unvisited.”
Call the parallels you aren’t from “branches” or “threads.” Try to think about the existence of parallel universes and ask yourself how you imagine them. Essentially, the mind has to attempt to process that there may be parallel universes to our own, ones largely like our own but that are not our own, and the mind (to varying degrees) balks at the notion.
They must “derive” from us, from the main universe, right? If you get all the Spider-mans together in one room, which one is the real one?
It is not a long journey from ranking universes in the multi-verse according to the level of their reality to then devaluing the universes (and the beings who populate them) lower down the rank.
Common, then, in at least some science fiction (especially of the dystopian variety) is a kind of cavalier treatment of the lives of those in the alternate realities. If you’ve ever watched Doctor Strange And the Multiverse of Madness, superheroes who seem indestructible in the “main” reality are alarmingly and easily disposed of if they are from alternative realities. So too in the television show Loki.
This is a tremendously common trope in much dystopian science fiction1, and I believe it arises not just because it was popular or has been popularized, but because it carries the burden of an essential moral insight.
I think authors so readily make this move in alternate reality fiction because it function this way in everyday reality as well. They are raising the prophetic alarm that one part of devaluing humans (and creation itself) begins by defining the other as not real.
Qanon conspiracy theories claim some people (like Tom Hanks) are actually adrenochrome blood harvesting aliens. I wish this level of diminishing the reality of the other were less common, but it is what we have.
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Consider then the extent to which in our present-day political reality some factions perceive “the other” as existing almost in parallel, science fictional universes. The most extreme example is the othering of Qanon, where the conspiracy theory literally believes some of their political opponents are actual reptilian aliens.
But consider also the extent to which, as just one example, those on the alt right believe all kinds of bizarre things about the intentions and actions of trans people (or queer people more generally). Most of what they believe could be dispelled quite easily by simply knowing a few trans people. Almost all of it is literally designed to make the group they hate (in the contemporary political context, trans people, but in previous eras Jews or other ethnic groups) seem so other as to almost inhabit a separate reality altogether.
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As an alternative to this othering, Christianity proposes intimate involvement. It is difficult to hate or devalue anything you truly know or are involved with.
“For a person to praise something in nature -for instance, a magnolia tree amid the gray monotony of a city street -she has to be involved in that which she extols. Her act of praise means that she has acquired an intimate knowledge of this particular magnolia. She can visualize it in movement or at rest. Its varying hues at different times of the day and night are imprinted on her memory. With her growing sense of this magnolia's beauty comes her own growth. So too the stargazer participates in nature's beauty through naming, recalling, knowing those distant entities, and his praise is nourished through his contemplation of the galaxy. The aesthetic process is the result of our participation in the created order” (To Work And To Love: A Theology of Creation, Dorothee Soelle with Shirley A. Cloyes, 1984).
We see this also portrayed in much of the speculative fiction that considers alternate realities. Again, in the popular Marvel universe portrayals, the various Spider-men (and women) come to appreciate and love each other when they spend time together and work together. So too, when characters in R. Carey’s Infinity Gate become involved in one another’s lives, they can no longer perceive those with which they are involved as disposable, lacking in reality, etc.
Soelle and Cloyes take the point even further, in a doxological direction, emphasizing that true involvement with something moves beyond simple recognition of its reality to actual praise. Sometimes we may even praise or cherish something in spite of its short-comings, and certainly will defend it if it is perceived by others around us as lacking in reality.
Why do I raise all of this in the context of a discussion of parallel universes, of the “morality of the multiverse”? Well, I think it helps in two ways. First, if we consider the portrayals of the multi-verse as prophetic expressions pointing back to our actual reality, we can see that a lot of the othering in our populist political discourse is the creation of alternative realities in our one reality.
If you don’t believe me, just find a true Qanon believer and try to disabuse them of their notions.
But second, I think consideration of the morality of the multi-verse can reframe what we mean by some of the ethical claims we make in the Christian theological space. Not enough of our creativity has been invested in the consideration of the multi-verse as a space of wonder and contemplation. Parallel universes might be resources to be exploited (this is true in The Peripheral and in Infinity Gate), their sheer number may be so great as to be overwhelming, but in aesthetic perspective if we allow ourselves to be involved with them, they may actually be worthy of our praise, attention, joy.
This then resounds back to how we consider the concrete others, the selves, who are a part of universes parallel to our own. Rather than perceiving them as derivative copies, disposable entities, threats, etc. such a posture toward alternate realities allows us to approach them in the way of love and wonder.
Many of the stories of Jesus are of this sort, perhaps chief among them the story of the Good Samaritan. That person, over there, living in an alternative reality to ours, almost entirely divorced from our own, but still slightly intersecting, that one right there is our chance to love.
Some of our best depictions of the multi-verse point us in this direction too. Dystopian at first, dramatic struggle certainly (you have to sell books and movies, after all) but in the end a kind of over-coming, a tale of love, of recognition of the other not as a feint echo of our more real selves, but an actual reality in and through which we become who we are in our love of them.
In other science fiction a similar phenomenon is at work, when who a person “is” is separable from their body, can be transported via computer or other means out of the body through the matrix and into another body, a similar devaluing of “bodies” occurs. See for example Altered Carbon and bodies as “sleeves.”
Scripture and our two dimensional universe. In the beginning God created the heaven and earth. The heaven denotes the spiritual realms while the earth displays the physical realms. In Genesis 1 we acknowledge the spiritual dimension things come to be via the Word. “ Let there be… In Genesis 2 we note a physical creation. God planted a garden and God formed man out of the dust of the earth. The spiritual world is the invisible, the antimatter, dark matter, or the supernatural. All miracles occur in the supernatural. In the invisible believing is seeing. While in the physical seeing is believing. The two realms may be joined by the third law of motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. While I have outlined this dichotomous universe the question of multiverses would occur as my universe is separate from your universe until they would intersect.
You lost me in the first paragraph but I read on anyway and that subject is too deep for me to contemplate.