Contemporary Science Fiction and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Sacrifice and Narrative Coherence

This book seeks to create a new means of interrogating the direction in which contemporary science fiction is progressing.

In the late 1950s, Hugh Everett III suggested that there is no way to say that there are not as many versions of what we experience as reality as there are particles in the universe. This movement in contemporary science fiction serves as the foreground for the sense of loss and the need for sacrifice to set things ’right’ after generations of technological praxis by the nations and communities that have traditionally driven science fiction-the Global North-that have damaged communities throughout the Global South. Colonialism and the drives for spheres of influence in the Cold War are now being met with the realities of such existential threats as global climate change. Narratives about the loss of control over time, reality, and human consciousness demonstrate the on-going ideological crises of faith in institutions like religion, capitalism, and education. It is the grief for lost utopian dreams for the future that drives this interest in Everett’s ’Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ or ’MWI.’

Jonathan P. Lewis is Associate Professor of English at Troy University.