Art from other worlds

Earth-742

A universe in which the Spanish telecommunications boom of the late 1970s produced an unexpected concentration of engineering talent in Barcelona and Madrid, seeding a generation of game developers a decade before their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. The divergence is industrial, not political — a single infrastructure contract, awarded differently, that changed which university departments got funded and which graduates went where. In Earth-742, the Spanish arcade industry of the early 1980s is considered among the finest in the world.

1 work

Earth-463

A universe in which Edgar Lee Masters, shown a collection of unsent letters instead of the Greek Anthology, wrote 244 letters from the living citizens of Spoon River rather than epitaphs from its dead. The Spoon River Anthology does not exist in Earth-463. What exists instead is a book about silence — about what it costs to know exactly what you want to say and choose, every morning, not to say it. It is considered one of the founding documents of American literary modernism. Masters never thought of the dead as having anything particular to say.

1 work

Earth-384

A universe in which G.B. Smith — J.R.R. Tolkien's closest friend and the most realist member of their literary circle — survived his wounds at the Somme in November 1916. His survival removed the urgency that drove Tolkien's mythology. The Silmarillion was never finished. The Lord of the Rings was never written. Instead, Tolkien published a single novel in 1957: a quiet, precise, politically devastating account of the enclosure of common land in Warwickshire, populated by characters who carry, without knowing it, the shapes of a mythology that in Earth-384 exists only in a box of notebooks.

1 work

Earth-516

A universe in which Stephen King's manuscript of Carrie was not retrieved from the wastebasket in early 1973 and was never published. King taught English at a high school in Maine for the next two decades, drank through most of the 1980s, got sober, and in 1988 began writing the only novel he would ever complete. The Long Dark (1991) is, in Earth-516, considered the finest American horror novel ever written — and also, by many, the finest American novel of any kind written in the last half-century. It exists as a single, unrepeated act: one book, one author, one chance.

1 work

Earth-201

A universe in which Sylvia Plath survived February 1963 and lived to write four further novels. The divergence is unremarkable in itself — a neighbour woken by a faulty boiler, a knocked door, a hospitalisation — but its consequences for the course of English-language fiction are considered, in Earth-201, to be among the most significant of the century. The question of what Plath would have written had she lived is, in our universe, permanently unanswerable. In Earth-201, it has been answered across four decades of quiet, precise, accumulating work.

1 work

Earth-277

A universe in which the commercial success of Tim Burton's Batman (1989) convinced DC and Warner Bros that the way to exploit the superhero genre was not to hire a second Tim Burton but to hire the most visionary American director available and give him complete creative control. The logic was sound; the outcome was not what they had in mind. The film they received — Sentinel (1991) — is a superhero film in the same way that Blue Velvet is a detective film: the genre is present, the conventions are present, and something is deeply, irreparably wrong with all of them. In Earth-277 it is considered one of the defining American films of the 1990s. Warner Bros did not commission a sequel.

1 work