Good Lord, a 4-column article in the Guardian Weekly (2nd-8th October edition) about the Multiverse and not a mention of any SF or Fantasy writer? Didn't William Gibson make SF "salonfähig" a few years back, robbing the mainstream media of a favoured scapegoat, the literary pendant to heavy metal music and comic books? Isn't Michael Moorcock, probably the source of most SF readers' first contact with the concept of the Multiverse, deserving of a little more acknowledgement? And don't quantum mechanics and string theory make the whole Multiverse idea look a little... dated?

Whatever. Those of us who've known since we were 12 that the physical universe is a sham can gloat in private or like company over our foreknowledge. Let the scientists jump up and down and wave their arms in the air about it all - at least every now and again one of them will come out with a gem of an idea, like the gravity that "waxes and wanes in a paisley pattern" (paraphrased by the article's author from Max Tegmark, cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania.) But they do go and screw things up for themselves by getting terribly excited about stuff like this:

"It gets worse. Mathematicians have proved that a universal computing machine can create an artificial world that is itself capable of creating or simulating its own world, and so on ad infinitum. (...) Because fake worlds can outnumber real ones without restriction,  the "real" multiverse would inevitably spawn a vastly greater number of virtual multiverses. Indeed, there would be a limitless tower of virtual multiverses, leaving the "real" one swamped in a sea of fakes." 

Now, don't correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that ring a small bell to anyone who's read, oh, say, the Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny? But unfortunately the only literary precedent to get name dropped is ...yawn... The Matrix. As if it hadn't gotten around yet that the Matrix creators are scavengers, um, I mean, adept and skillful plagiarists? As if it wasn't the case that every reviewer worth his or her salt, and steeped in the Black Arts of namedropping and oneupmanship, had mentioned Philip Dick, at least, in writing about the Matrix? It seems that the Matrix films served to concentrate a certain number of concepts from SF literature in a palatable form, enabling a large number of people to get hip to the protointracephalicvirtualmultiverseparanoidcyberthingy we call call reality. It's a shame, as is so often the case, that the original (and often more gifted) proponents of a particular idea get not only ignored but almost actively buried under a supermarket of derivations. And note that we haven't even begun talking about the "new ideas" in both SF and state-of-the-art experimental scientific theory actually being Platonic shadows of knowledge embedded in myriad myth cycles and belief systems...

All in all the article sucked. The inane attempt to enliven things towards the end by extrapolating "multiverse theory" into the rather disturbing notion that a bad joke will always work somewhere, simply because existence and therefore people are limitless in their variety, merely made of a scientific article the same mockey that the front page made of political reporting. Schwarzenegger for Governor? Please.

Personally I'm more concerned about whether Roy is going to pull through. Because poor Siegfried looked very unhappy on Larry King, and apparently, Montecore was trying to protect Roy, dragging him away from what the tiger perceived to be a threat in traditional cat manner, ie. grabbing the youngling by the scruff of the neck. I felt tears spring to my eyes. Las Vegas is supposedly going to crawl back into its primeval slimehole of sex and gambling, and two nice-mannered Bavarian gay boys are going to while away their twilight years in alternating ridicule and obscurity. In an infinity of Multiverses there will be no lack of such sad endings.

Patrick Charles