This gendered envisioning of science has increasingly been appropriated by other authors of nontechnical works mass-produced for a general readership, a literary style made popular by astronomer Carl Sagan. For example, in one of his last works, The Demon-haunted World, he explains that “science arouses a soaring sense of wonder” and that the book was “a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science” (6, 25). In The Trouble with Physics, his 2006 book-length argument against the hegemony of string theory, Lee Smolin notes that “the most cherished goal in physics, as in bad romance novels, is unification” (18), and the current king of science popularizations, Stephen Hawking, says of the “Eureka moment” of making a scientific discovery, “I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer” (117). String theory is often called “beautiful” or “seductive” by its proponents,1 and the embarrassment that most scientists consider the “landscape” of string theory (the huge number of possible mathematical realities it predicts) is instead celebrated by the theory’s adherents as a “fecundity” that is “part of its appeal” (Pease 987). Roszak points to these “domineering sexual metaphors” as evidence that feminist psychologists are correct in suspecting that there is “a powerful masculine bias not only in science as a profession, but in science as a worldview” (56). Fortunately, in Gaiman’s work we shall now see a transition from a passive, oppressed feminine principle in nature to more modern, and far more powerful, “liberated” quantum cosmological goddesses, agents of change who have the ability to traverse, create, and even destroy entire universes.
Noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison explains in his introduction to Gaiman’s The Sandman: Season of Mists that “every fantasist builds a new universe each time s/he creates a new story” (9). Ellison notes further that Gaiman’s particularly “full-realized cosmology” is “as compelling as it is revisionist.” Part of Gaiman’s talent lies in this ability to successfully create Secondary Worlds, both singularly and serially, and in multitudes (considering the totality of his published works). But Gaiman flexes his authorial muscles most strongly when he abandons classical fairy-tale worlds (such as that in Stardust) and enters the quantum realm, diving headfirst into modern fantasy and science fiction. In his foreword to Paul McAuley’s Doctor Who novella Eye of the Tyger, Gaiman explains that he had “become infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds, only a footstep away” (8). In InterWorld, Gaiman and co-author Michael Reaves explore the very quantum idea of an infinite number of alternate universes being created by human decisions—perhaps the most powerful manifestation of free will possible. Here Gaiman refers to an alternative to the standard Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, called the Many Worlds Interpretation or MWI (Everett III 1957). In this model, every time an experiment with several possible outcomes is conducted, the universe branches into parallel realities, one for each of the possible outcomes. Therefore, anything that can happen, does happen. Reality with a capital R is the sum of all possible parallel realities or universes, sometimes called a multiverse. Which one of you is the real you? All of you are just as real, in your own particular universe. What’s more, in its original form, the MWI predicts that since there is no effect of one reality on another, there is no way one observer can ever be aware of the splitting process. As Jay explains to Joey Harker, important decisions by an individual “can cause alternate worlds to splinter off into divergent space-time continua.... Of course, the In-Between keeps them apart, so he’ll never know” (Gaiman, InterWorld 72–73). In the novel, only the Walkers can travel across the hyperspace known as the In-Between, and other characters can only harness the essence of the Walkers in order to travel through the periphery of this hyperspace, a space known as the Static or Nowhere-at-All (considered the long way around in interdimensional travel). Therefore the ability to travel freely between universes is a special skill in the multiverse of InterWorld.
But physicist David Deutsch has demonstrated that in a modification of the MWI it is possible for the various parallel universes to interact, and in fact it is the existence of this infinite multiplicity of parallel universes, each with its own unique timeline, that physicists now understand theoretically allows for the possibility of time travel into the past without causing paradoxes (such as someone killing their parents before they themselves were conceived). The idea of traveling between parallel realities or universes has been used in numerous works of science fiction. For example, in the TV series Sliders, genius physicist Quinn Mallory accidentally creates a machine that opens doorways between alternate realities. Mallory and his friends afterwards “slide” between these different realities, each somehow different from the reality from which they originated. In the 2001 cult movie Donnie Darko, an unstable tangent universe suddenly opens up in the nick of time to save the title character from certain death when an airplane engine falls on his house. But as Donnie discovers, through reading a mysterious book called The Philosophy of Time Travel, he must go back to the primary universe and die in the original accident in order to save the primary world.
Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy exploits the Many Worlds Interpretation to posit the existence of multiple realities (including an underworld repository for human souls), and begins in the universe of Lyra Belacqua, a universe that blends science and spirituality in a way that is a clear commentary on the antagonistic relationship between science and spirituality of modern society. Here Lyra’s mother, Marisa Coulter, conducts gruesome scientific experiments on children (sanctioned by the Church) in order to try to prevent them from knowing original sin, while Lyra’s father, Lord Asriel, uses similar experiments to harness the same psychic power to open a doorway to another universe (with the purpose of gathering an army to declare war on the Deity of the Church). Lyra is able to pass from universe to universe, initially by using the doorway opened by her father, and later through her relationship with Will Parry, who becomes the bearer of the Subtle Knife. With the knife the pair can pass from any universe to any other by creating their own doorway, and their travels are aided by Lyra’s masterful use of the alethiometer, a device that gives the answer to specific questions through a series of symbols. In the beginning of the trilogy, Lyra has an uncanny innate ability to read the symbols, but when she symbolically passes into womanhood (symbolized through falling in love with Will) she loses this seemingly magical power and must instead rely on a more scientific approach to relearning how to use the device. Mary Malone (who likewise travels between realities) also bridges the chasm between science and spirituality/magic by relying on her own method of divination, the I Ching, a habit which, being a scientist, brings her feelings of anxiety and guilt.
Like Pullman’s trilogy, Gaiman and Reaves’ InterWorld also relies on the Many World Interpretation of quantum mechanics. In this work, the main characters, many of whom are alternate reality versions of Joey Harker, travel between parallel universes. Therefore, QCG can be found in this work as well, but as these characters clearly illustrate another important property of the QCG (namely the relationship between science and spirituality), this work (and its connections with Pullman’s work) will be further discussed later in this essay.
In the same vein as Pullman’s Mary and Lyra, Neverwhere’s Door is also QCG, and like Lyra, realizes her ultimate destiny while working under the impression that she is completely in control of her own free will. Like the bearer of the Subtle Knife, Door can create portals at will, but like InterWorld’s Jo, her only technology is her belief that she can do so. Door comes from a family of such “openers,” and while her father schooled her in the scientific principles of “Parity, symmetry, topology,” the most important lesson was that “all things want to open. You must feel that need, and use it” (215). Thus Door also links together science and the super-natural (experiences outside science) in her unique powers, which is an interesting aspect of these new QCGs. While her own personal mission is to exact revenge for the murder of her family, she becomes e
ntangled in a greater cosmological drama, namely the fate of the jailed fallen angel Islington, who is not only responsible for her family’s deaths (and the destruction of Atlantis), but also plans to take over Heaven in revenge for his imprisonment in London Below. Door appears to acquiesce to his demand to save her friend Richard Mayhew, but in actuality she opens a doorway to the most distant location she could reach, “halfway across space and time” (338). Islington is sucked into a chaotic maelstrom through the force of gravity, a tremendous vortex that Richard recognizes as possibly being “the event horizon of a black hole” (329). In this way, Door is more clearly aligned with the general relativity (gravity and warping of space-time) side of modern physics than quantum mechanics, an alignment also seen in another of Gaiman’s fascinating and powerful QCG, namely the evil Other Mother of Coraline.
The evil Alternative Mother who tries to make Coraline her permanent guest first traps the girl’s parents in an alternative dimension behind the hall mirror. She had previously trapped the souls of other kidnapped children behind another mirror. Coraline discovers that the Other Mother has created her own world, one designed specifically to entice and trap children like Coraline. The girl tries to escape, but finds that if she walks too far, she just comes back to the place she started. Coraline is confused, but the black cat likens it to walking around the earth. The Other Mother’s “closed universe” is therefore a much smaller example of Einstein’s original “spherical” model of our own universe, as described by his general theory of relativity.2 In such a universe, light rays sent off toward infinity would, after a very long time, return to their starting place. Such a universe is bounded but without an end, since the “end” is just the beginning again. However, as Coraline observes, in this case it is a “small world” (75). Regardless of this world’s limited size, the Other Mother is certainly to be included in Gaiman’s pantheon of QCG. It should be noted, however, that, as the villain of the tale, the Other Mother has significant limits to her powers (besides only making a small world in which to trap the children). Like other evil characters (such as Tolkien’s Melkor), the Other Mother could not “truly make anything.... She could only twist and copy and distort things that already existed,” a prime example being the deformed Other Father (118).
The works discussed thus far demonstrate Gaiman’s masterful use of parallel worlds. As Gaiman and Reaves playfully remind their audience in the Authors’ Note to InterWorld, although theirs is a fictional work, “still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible universes is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe it’s not as fictional as we think” (2). The action in this novel takes place in a subset of the entire multiverse (the sum of all possible universes) termed the “Altiverse,” which consists only of those universes that contain Earths (hence the existence of the myriad manifestations of alternate Joey Harkers). Other works of Gaiman in which characters travel between universes include Neverwhere, The Sandman series, and MirrorMask. However, these works pay homage to a different type of multiverse, namely that of the inflationary revision of the Big Bang theory.
The Big Bang theory of the early universe casts reality as the child of an uneasy marriage between quantum mechanics (which describes the rules of the subatomic universe) and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a re-envisioning of gravity as the warping of the four-dimensional fabric termed space-time. According to this model, the infant universe was initially in a very hot, dense state and has expanded and cooled over the past 13.7 or so billion years. Hence when Lucifer bemoans the fact that he’s been tending hell for 10 billion years, he’s simply rounding the number (Gaiman, Sandman 23:14). While the Big Bang has been corroborated by numerous observational tests, it does not actually claim to tell us about the exact origin of the universe, but rather explains the evolution of the universe from that initial hot, dense state. In fact, science can say nothing of certainty about what happened before 1043 seconds after a presumed beginning. This is because scientists lack a complete understanding of how the two mathematically disparate legs of modern physics should merge at these high energies and small distances. At current it is a shotgun marriage at best. Be that as it may, this lack of a complete model of quantum gravity has not prevented physicists from developing possible scenarios for the origin of the universe. In 1973, Edward Tryon proposed the rather startling idea that the entire universe began as a random vacuum fluctuation of space-time and grew to its present state long afterwards. As he somewhat flippantly puts it, “our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time” (397).
Tryon’s model was initially largely ignored by the scientific community; however, in 1981, particle physicist Alan Guth found that a revision of Tryon’s model answered several nagging questions about the nature of the young universe. He found that under certain conditions, there would exist a temporary repulsive force, like an antigravity, which would inflate a small portion of the infant universe exponentially, growing from less than the size of an atom to the size of a grapefruit in the blink of an eye. Eventually this era of “inflation” ends, with the now separate bud of the original universe then resuming the evolution predicted by the usual Big Bang model. Other sections of the original mother universe could have inflated as well, but would never contact its siblings after leaving the quantum mechanical nest.
In 1982, Alexander Vilenkin further extended Tryon’s idea by proposing that the entire universe began through the quantum mechanical process known as tunneling, in other words making a sudden change from one state to another. In this instance, the initial state was nothing in its truest sense (no space, no time) and the final state was something in its ultimate sense—a universe made of space-time. Further improvements to the inflationary model demonstrate that once inflation begins, it will never end, a concept called eternal inflation. Individual “bubbles” will continue to bud off, each leading to a separate or pocket universe. The collection of all pocket universes that derive from the mother universe is sometimes called the multiverse (not to be confused with the multiverse of the Many Worlds Interpretation). According to eternal inflation, at all moments, some pocket universe is being created by undergoing inflation, and once formed evolves independently of all its sibling universes.
It is these new views of reality as multiple and moldable—in some sense the scientific equivalent of Faerie—that Gaiman draws upon in his writings. For example, in Neverwhere “little pockets of old time in London” simultaneously exist as London Below, “like bubbles in amber” (228). In MirrorMask multiple realities come into being and are threatened with destruction, as is the case in The Sandman series. It is in this latter work that Gaiman’s vision of a multiverse is best developed. As Clive Barker explains in his introduction to The Sandman: The Doll’s House, “There is no solid status quo, only a series of relative realities” which are traversed by “dimension-hopping entities” (6). These myriad worlds include Hell, Asgard, Chaos, The Dreaming (itself a multiverse of individual dreamers and the possibility of dreams), and the other realities created by The Endless Ones. Lucien’s library is also a sort of multiverse, as it contains “every story that has ever been dreamed” and “novels their authors never wrote or never finished, except in dreams” (Gaiman, Sandman 22:2). Travel between these realities is similar to that in Interworld, in that it takes place in a sort of inhospitable hyperspace. On his way to visit Lucifer in Hell, Morpheus travels through the desolate and cold “NOWHERE” that is “BETWEEN place” (Gaiman, Sandman 23:1). Guth, Farhi, and Guven may theorize about creating an experimental universe in the lab, but in The Sandman: Season of Mists, Odin does just that, fashioning a “notional dimension” in which he creates a tiny version of Ragnarok in order to explore the properties of his greatest fear—the inevitable twilight of the Norse gods (26:14).
Is this power of Odin’s strictly fiction? If Mother Nature continues to give birth to
child universes even today, is it possible to create our own pocket universe in the laboratory? Could physicists follow in the footsteps of biologists and “play God” in manipulating the reproduction not of individuals or species, but entire realities? In a seminal 1987 paper, Alan Guth, Steven Blau and E.I Guendelman described the space-time structure of such “child universes” and found that since this inflation takes place in another space-time, not our own, the gateway to this child universe appears as a black hole in our universe. Like the TARDIS, such a universe would certainly be bigger on the inside than the outside. While a companion paper by Guth and Ed Farhi showed that it may be technically unlikely to be able to create a child universe in a laboratory using classical physics (i.e. general relativity alone), a third paper by Farhi, Guth, and Guven showed that it might just be possible to create a pocket universe of one’s own using quantum mechanics. In addition, there is no reason to expect that the laws of physics in other pocket universes will echo those of our reality (an integral part of the plotline of InterWorld).
Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman Page 41