AlphaGazette #11: When Worlds Collide | SC11 – Havoc In the Pacific

I've always loved science-fiction. One of my first movie memories is Planet of the Apes when I was five or six, and the first book I can truly remember reading was a musty old paperback about interplanetary space cops, called Second Stage Lensmen, by Doc E.E. Smith. My memory of the plot is so vague as to be nonexistent, but I recall secret agents saving the galaxy, and liked it well enough to read two or three more books in the series—none of which I remember either.

Fantasy, on the other hand, never really caught my interest, neither the elves and orcs nor the witches and ghosts varieties, and especially not the whole heaven and hell, angels and devil bit. I was just a young rationalist who would accept the most outlandish of ideas as long as there was at least a thread of scientific logic to support it. I get the "science is magic if its advanced enough" angle, but it too often seemed convenient or arbitrary.

I believe it’s as simple as sci-fi looks forward while fantasy tends to look back into the past. Consequently, even time travel stories that go backwards rather than forwards tend to lose my interest, unless they depict a significantly different present due to changing the past. In other words, show me an alternate version of now. Show me enough versions of now and you have a multiverse.

An instance is an alternate Earth, and another name for timeline, therefore, the difference between time travel and traveling from one Earth to another is virtually nil, except that isn't, at least in most literary and cinematic interpretations. Time travel stories often are about cause and effect, where the risk is in changing the past, which will consequently change the future. Alternate universe stories usually exploit the opposite, where one world has nothing to do with the next.

Havoc In The Pacific is what happens when two universes are so close in makeup that the barrier between them disappears, if only briefly.