Every Man a Demiurge.Jesse Walker's "Every Man a Demiurge demiurge (dĕm`ēûrj') [Gr.,=workman, craftsman], name given by Plato in a mythological passage in the Timaeus to the creator God. " (February) traces the rise and demise of an entertainment genre depicting reality as an illusion or simulation. A similar genre also had a smaller rise and fall during that time: the idea that our universe is but one of many in a multiverse A multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including our universe) that together comprise all of physical reality. The different universes within a multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes. , in which alternate universes are identical to ours up to a certain point but then diverge diverge - If a series of approximations to some value get progressively further from it then the series is said to diverge. The reduction of some term under some evaluation strategy diverges if it does not reach a normal form after a finite number of reductions. . Such alternate histories have been around for a while, such as in the collections edited by Greg Ben ford. In the '90s on television there was Sliders sliders a species of tortoise kept as pets. They have a black shell and a red stripe behind the eye. Called also Chrysemys scripta elegans, red-eared sliders. , with worlds in which the dinosaurs lived into modern times, the American Revolution American Revolution, 1775–83, struggle by which the Thirteen Colonies on the Atlantic seaboard of North America won independence from Great Britain and became the United States. It is also called the American War of Independence. never took place, or population control was enforced through soft drinks containing birth control chemicals and lotteries for killing off people. On the movie screen there was Sliding Doors, where in one universe the protagonist just misses a subway train, while in another she just barely catches it. In the latter she arrives home to find her mate in bed with another woman; in the former the other woman leaves before her arrival, leading to very different consequences. Sliders, being a series, exhibited the same decay Walker notes in the "illusion" genre. Later episodes focused on fighting the evil Kromaggs in chases across the universes, which themselves no longer had any remarkable distinguishing features, except that sorcery sorcery: see incantation; magic; spell; witchcraft. Sorcery Sorrow (See GRIEF.) sorcerer’s apprentice finds a spell that makes objects do the cleanup work. [Fr. seemed to work in some of them. Such seems to be the inevitable down slope of popular series. Charles Kluepfel Bloomfield, NJ |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion