Earlier this year Jonathan Russell Clark wrote an article for Esquire entitled “The End of the Multiverse” in which he considered the concept of the multiverse as both a storytelling device and as a lens through which to examine the psychology of one’s regrets.
In the article Clark references several novels, graphic novels, television shows, and films as exemplars of multiverse stories and suggests that the concept is now overused and falling out of favor: “There is, if you will, a multiverse of multiverses,” he writes.
I was particularly fascinated by what he wrote about the allure of multiverses — that their appeal is due to our “perpetual unhappiness”— and by the meta concept that art itself allows a “peek into the multiverse,” a way for us to “ponder the possibilities of passed-over paths.”
I began to think about my own consumption of stories with parallel universes, alternate timelines, time travel, and what-ifs. Tropes or not, some of my favorite stories have these fantastical or science fiction elements. Below are a few of them.
Jack Finney’s magnum opus is one of my favorite multiverse stories, full of love, action, and adventure. An advertising sketch artist in 1970 joins a covert government project in which he uses self-hypnosis to travel back in time to New York City in 1882. While investigating a tragic death and a mysterious fire, he falls in love and, ultimately, must choose whether to return to modern life or stay in the past. (In the 1980 romantic fantasy drama Somewhere in Time, Christopher Reeve’s character also uses self-hypnosis to journey back to 1912 to meet an actress, played by Jane Seymour, whose photograph he’d fallen in love with. This film is available to stream on Amazon Prime.)
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with mysteries and thrillers, particularly as audiobooks, and particularly those in the subgenre “domestic noir” (think Ruth Ware, Alice Feeney, Lucy Foley). In the novel Wrong Place, Wrong Time, a mother who witnesses her teenage son stab a stranger on the street wakes up the next morning and finds that it’s yesterday, the day before her son commits murder. And every subsequent morning, when she wakes up, it’s the day before; she’s living her life backward. The dramatic question of the novel is will she be able to piece together the events that led to her son’s act of violence? And can she figure out how to stop him in time?
Because the SRB likes to champion small presses, I wanted to include this 78-page novelette, published by Shortwave Media. During a virtual reality experiment, the protagonist Zoe glimpses a past in which she would have met the love of her life, if not for a split-second decision. Obsessed, she returns to her alternative life again and again, falling in love with the man she should have met, to the detriment of her “actual” life. I just picked up this Edinburgh-based author’s new collection, Limelight and Other Stories.
This science fiction romantic thriller with Matt Damon as a congressman and Emily Blunt as a ballerina has been a favorite of mine since its release in 2011. It’s very loosely based on the Philip K. Dick science fiction short story, “Adjustment Team,” published in 1954. In the film, a shadowy cabal of usually unseen, otherworldly manipulators try to prevent our hero and heroine from being together.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
Starring Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, Jamie Lee Curtis, and James Hong
This is the quintessential multiverse movie. A middle-aged Chinese immigrant explores other universes and other lives she might have lived in order to save human existence and repair her relationship with her daughter. Talk about a genre mashup: it contains elements of fantasy, science fiction, surreal comedy, family drama, and action/adventure. It’s a wild ride and the recipient of seven Oscars.
Called a “magical realist romance” or a “science fiction romantic comedy,” two teenagers, Mark and Margaret, are trapped in a time loop, reliving the same summer day over and over again à la Groundhog Day. While they try to figure out how to escape the loop, they construct a map of all the tiny things that make a single day perfect and fall in love. Amazon adapted the 53-page novelette by Lev Grossman into this very sweet film, also written by Grossman. It can be streamed on Amazon Prime.
Russian Doll
Created by Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler
Starring Natasha Lyonne
Russian Doll is an American comedy-drama television series that premiered on Netflix in 2019. There are two seasons for a total of 15 episodes. Lyonne plays a software engineer who gets caught in a time loop, repeatedly dying and reliving the same night over and over, the night of her 36th birthday. She spends the first season trying to figure out what is happening to her and how to stop it. In the second season, a few days away from her 40th birthday, the 6 train sends her back in time to 1982. She later finds out that she is trapped inside the body of her mother, who is pregnant with her. I loved Lyonne’s performance here, despite some calling her character, Nadia, unlikeable (you can see what I think about the term “unlikeable” for female characters here).
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