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Authors: Paul Pipkin
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The data retrievable from his encyclopedic mind
was invaluable to me, not to mention his ability to encompass the bulk of my personal madness without wincing.
As Joe sees it, while American science fiction today may not be wholly out of the closet, the young reader, unarguably, is
deprived of our earlier thrill. We experienced the reading of science fiction as something of a dirty little masturbatory
secret, hence charged with all the lure of the forbidden. Maybe the effect derived from frequently reading it under the covers
with a flashlight.
For months, I’d been scouring the libraries and bookshops, digging up the old science fiction I recalled from pre-Everett
times that clearly presaged the many-worlds. In the process, I’d identified other, more mainstream literary works predominantly
by British authors, which were clearly germane.
That stormy evening
… sorry about that, but it really was, you see. The gusting torrents and ball lightning had reminded me too intensely of a
night years before. That night Richard, my closest teenage comrade, had entered upon a path of disappointments, on the darker
side of love, which would take his life by his midthirties. It had been a common enough story, rejection by a pregnant girlfriend
in favor of a rival whom an ignorant community deemed a “better catch.” But, from that night forth, Richard had seemed damned
to repeatedly re-create the same failures.
Joe had been in town, and we were at my house reviewing the above-mentioned works. His phenomenal memory aside, neither had
Joe actually read these materials for many years. We were both astonished at how precisely the early authors had represented
a theory not yet formally constructed.
Across the Atlantic, I’d found another pregnant hint from the neglected British giant Olaf Stapledon. He was subsequently
as much despised, by the American literary establishment, for the fact that he indisputably produced literature as for his
leftist politics. I was hardly innocent of the ominous imperatives that had framed official intellectual bigotry in the United
States since at least the late thirties.
America could not admit quality to exist in the genre in which Stapledon wrote in 1937:
In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all,
thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence
of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was faced with many possible courses, and the combinations of all their
courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this
cosmos. 9
Stapledon had written in praise of the work of J.W. Dunne, an engineer, whom I have characterized “a scientist.” That inclusion
will no doubt antagonize a few idiots with sheepskins. Tough shit. Dunne and his great admirer, the author and playwright
J.B. Priestley, were vital cross-links within those British intellectual circles of the thirties noted earlier—links that
not only affected this sort of literature, but also were major conduits through which the ideas of the great physicists were
popularized. Those early writers, attuned to the cutting-edge science of their time, crafted a vision of motion in additional
dimensions for a public having difficulty just getting behind relativity.
————————
J ORGE L UIS B ORGES’S “T HE G ARDEN OF F ORKING P ATHS ” presented a labyrinthine analogy for the vision following upon Dunne’s intuition. The great Latin American scholar produced,
in “Garden,” possibly the most eerie of the anticipations of the manyworlds. Annotators have remarked that Borges read everything,
especially what no one else read anymore. Small wonder that he credited Dunne.
He described a “work within the work,” a fictional book by a Chinese
was invaluable to me, not to mention his ability to encompass the bulk of my personal madness without wincing.
As Joe sees it, while American science fiction today may not be wholly out of the closet, the young reader, unarguably, is
deprived of our earlier thrill. We experienced the reading of science fiction as something of a dirty little masturbatory
secret, hence charged with all the lure of the forbidden. Maybe the effect derived from frequently reading it under the covers
with a flashlight.
For months, I’d been scouring the libraries and bookshops, digging up the old science fiction I recalled from pre-Everett
times that clearly presaged the many-worlds. In the process, I’d identified other, more mainstream literary works predominantly
by British authors, which were clearly germane.
That stormy evening
… sorry about that, but it really was, you see. The gusting torrents and ball lightning had reminded me too intensely of a
night years before. That night Richard, my closest teenage comrade, had entered upon a path of disappointments, on the darker
side of love, which would take his life by his midthirties. It had been a common enough story, rejection by a pregnant girlfriend
in favor of a rival whom an ignorant community deemed a “better catch.” But, from that night forth, Richard had seemed damned
to repeatedly re-create the same failures.
Joe had been in town, and we were at my house reviewing the above-mentioned works. His phenomenal memory aside, neither had
Joe actually read these materials for many years. We were both astonished at how precisely the early authors had represented
a theory not yet formally constructed.
Across the Atlantic, I’d found another pregnant hint from the neglected British giant Olaf Stapledon. He was subsequently
as much despised, by the American literary establishment, for the fact that he indisputably produced literature as for his
leftist politics. I was hardly innocent of the ominous imperatives that had framed official intellectual bigotry in the United
States since at least the late thirties.
America could not admit quality to exist in the genre in which Stapledon wrote in 1937:
In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all,
thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence
of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was faced with many possible courses, and the combinations of all their
courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this
cosmos. 9
Stapledon had written in praise of the work of J.W. Dunne, an engineer, whom I have characterized “a scientist.” That inclusion
will no doubt antagonize a few idiots with sheepskins. Tough shit. Dunne and his great admirer, the author and playwright
J.B. Priestley, were vital cross-links within those British intellectual circles of the thirties noted earlier—links that
not only affected this sort of literature, but also were major conduits through which the ideas of the great physicists were
popularized. Those early writers, attuned to the cutting-edge science of their time, crafted a vision of motion in additional
dimensions for a public having difficulty just getting behind relativity.
————————
J ORGE L UIS B ORGES’S “T HE G ARDEN OF F ORKING P ATHS ” presented a labyrinthine analogy for the vision following upon Dunne’s intuition. The great Latin American scholar produced,
in “Garden,” possibly the most eerie of the anticipations of the manyworlds. Annotators have remarked that Borges read everything,
especially what no one else read anymore. Small wonder that he credited Dunne.
He described a “work within the work,” a fictional book by a Chinese
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