There Are Doors

Jeff Wilson · 21 May 2009, 17:00 · from 2009-May.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 12:00:26 -0500
Subject: (urth) There Are Doors
In-Reply-To: <B5E017DA1B9D48BF8C3FD27E255BF398@eMachinePC>
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Message-ID: <4A1588AA.2070805 at io.com>

James Wynn wrote:
>>>> I bought "There Are Doors" at a used bookstore
>>>> last week.  I am thoroughly impressed.
>>>
>>> TAD is the only "parallel universe" story to offer a systemic 
>>> justification the close similarities in parallel universes that have 
>>> major variations in their histories: Nearby universes are influencing 
>>> each other at a non-rational level.
>>
>> What's non-rational about people spreading artifacts, memes, and genes 
>> back and forth?
> 
> That's not the explanation given. Green compares the universes to two 
> adjacent guitar strings tuned to the same note. When you pluck one, the 
> other resonates. By the same token, men in our world wear black at their 
> weddings. There's no "reason" for it.  They wear black here, because 
> they wear black there. They wear black there for a rational reason: The 
> man is about to die.

But there is *also* a vector of frequent physical travel that the author 
tales pains to display, so that resonance explanation need not be valid. 
It may just be another of Green's notions.

As for it being the only story with such a justification, I can think of 
at least three others: Lawrence Watt-Evans' _Out of This World_ and 
Christopher Stasheff's Greymarye series, where the present days in 
worlds of different histories are similar because the mental powers that 
bridge between the worlds only works between worlds where someone is 
thinking with a similar vocabulary along similar lines at either end. 
John M. Ford's _Fugue State_ and his metafictional work in GURPS TIME 
TRAVEL establishes that of all possible worlds, only the most similar 
are reachable with finite resources, and "similar" comes in various degrees.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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