Post-Election:  

Are We Living in An Alternative Universe?

When I woke up Wednesday morning, I hoped desperately that I wasn’t awake, that it was a bad dream.  Or maybe that it was a joke.  Or that I had fallen into a science fiction movie in which I had been hurled through the space-time continuum to an alternative reality.  My personal sense of despair is not unique here in Arlington.  The mood is somber.  Yesterday, people openly sobbed in my yoga class.  I find it difficult to stay focused on any task at hand, the pit in my stomach so deep and gnawing.  Books, however, are, as we all know, a great place to escape, at least for a few hours.   So, I offer you three books in which there really is an alternative universe – one I am currently reading, one I recently finished, and one I read with enthusiasm several years ago.  The topic immediately brings to mind science-fiction, but these books fit that category in only the loosest ways, so don’t be put off by the idea. 

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (creator of the Wayward Pines book and television series) begins with quantum physicist Jason Dessen happily making dinner with his wife, Daniela, and their fifteen year old son, Charlie, in their cozy brownstone in Chicago.  Jason, once a rising star in the scientific community, has chosen family life over one dedicated to research, and he now teaches at a second-rate local college.  He is sharply reminded of his choice to have a life outside of science when he slips out to a local bar where a celebration is in progress for his old college friend who has just won a significant award.  On the way home, Jason is grabbed at gunpoint and forced to drive to an abandoned Southside warehouse where he is knocked out.  When he comes to, he is lying on a gurney surrounded by people he doesn’t recognize, people who claim to work for him and who, mystifyingly say that he disappeared 14 months earlier.  When Jason escapes the complex, the Chicago he knew before does not seem to exist.  Although there is a little science – enough to provide a theory for the seemingly impossible –the story is really about a man who looks, with alarm, at the forks in the road, and the “What ifs?” that plague us all.  (What if James Comey hadn’t sabotaged the election?  What if more young people had voted?)  The book is a page-turner!

Ready Player One by Ernest Kline takes place in the near future when people have continued to devastate the environment and when technology has advanced to the point that people can live “virtually” in an online world known as the Oasis, without regard for the mess they have made. The creation of billionaire inventor and successful video-game designer James Halliday, Oasis is “a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis,” Mr. Cline writes.  For many people, “reality” is the virtual world, the place where they have relationships, work, play and study. (A place that is frankly looking pretty good right now)

Upon his death, Halliday leaves a series of puzzles and challenges all based on his obsession with ‘80’s pop music, tv shows and movies.  The first to be able to solve the challenges becomes heir to Halliday’s fortune and owner of the Oasis. Thousands of people, working as avatars in the virtual world to solve the puzzle, are known as gunters, and these individuals read, watch and absorb everything they can to figure out Halliday’s clues.  Tension is provided in the form of a large and greedy corporation that is devoting its mighty resources to winning the game in order to take control of the Oasis.  Thus, it becomes a bit of a battle between good and evil.

The story is told from the point of view of teenager Wade Watts who daily escapes his aunt’s trailer, 53 levels up in a stack on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, retreating to his hidey hole, a car in a junk heap that still has the keys in it and which he has rigged to get electricity.  He spends his days there attending a virtual high school in the Oasis and his afternoons and evenings as his alter-ego and avatar, Parzifal, attempting to solve the puzzle.  Wade’s only friends are people he has never met in person, other gunters known as H and Art3mis, whose avatars would suggest they are a strong and handsome young man and a beautiful, clever young woman, respectively.  Wade doesn’t really know, however.  Either could be, he says more than once, a 300 pound middle-aged guy named Chuck in real life. 

While by no means great literature, the book is exciting in several ways.  Parzifal and his friends jockey with avatars from the company in the race to find the keys and open the gates (stages in the game).  At one point, the virtual battle spills into the real world where death is more than having to recreate your virtual personality.  There’s also a bit of a romance.  I listened to this as an audio book; read by Wil Wheaton (Star Trek the Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher) with whom the inside jokes relating to Star Trek and Star Wars take on even greater humor.  I find myself wishing I had this virtual escape right now. . .

Definitely fitting into the mystery genre, The City and The City by China Miéville is based on an interesting premise:  two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, exist in the same space somewhere in Eastern Europe.  It’s a very Star Trek concept – parallel universes, alternate realities, but distanced by time rather than by space. Beszel is described as a more traditional Balkan city, with billings dating from an earlier time and a bit run down.  Ul Qoma is a modern metropolis.  Citizens of each city are conditioned to “unsee” each other as well as the buildings of the other city.  Cars drive around each other.  There are areas called “cross hatchings” that seem to belong to both cities and where it is most important not to perceive the other place.  Other locations are purely one or the other.  To go from one city to the other, citizens are required to go to Copula Hall, a building that exists in both cities.  There are border patrols and you must have an international passport, just as if you are going to England or France.  That is how you go from one to the other legally.  Citizens can “breach” – a term for failing to unsee the other city or for crossing into the other city at a cross-hatched area. 

The plot revolves around the solving of a crime by Beszel detective Tyador Borlu, who is called to the scene of a murder; an archaeologist PhD student from Ul Qoma is found dead in Beszel.  Borlu’s investigations lead him to groups of rabid nationalists intent on destroying the other city, groups of unificationists who want one united country, and to a cult interested in old legends that say there is a third city, hidden between the other two.  A review I read suggested that Miéville could be creating a giant allegory, a criticism of how modern societies choose to see only what they want to see (a timely idea – think climate change deniers, those who really believe that Trump is bringing back manufacturing jobs), but there is also the possibility that he is just playing with a fantasy idea while trying to write a solid murder mystery.  Either way, the book is intriguing and entertaining.