Austin Walker- A Parallel World is a Dialectic

Austin Walker

A Parallel World is a Dialectic

It would be easy to write the “Parallel World” off as a common sci-fi trope, a fantastic tool to establish setting, and an efficient way of establishing the unbelievable as certain. But I think that misses the point and diminishes the potential strength of the genre.

Any work featuring parallel worlds is a work featuring, at its foremost, a system of discourse. More specifically, it is necessarily a dialectic examination of at least two ideas. All parallel worlds are, after all, parallel to something.

Often this is a world parallel to the author’s own. Phillip K. Dick’s work is filled with this. BothThe Man In The High Castle and Dr. Bloodmoney offer up alternative, near-future histories. In some instances these are strikingly familiar to what would truly follow, but started at some assumed what-if. Dick used these worlds to highlight the risks we faced as a modern society – ecologically, militarily, and socially.

Often, a parallel world is placed alongside another parallel world (instead of simply being set up against our own.) Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World switches between two narratives, one set in a near-future world of cybercrime and idea-theft, and the other in a Kafkaesque village, where men and women lose their identities, and prowl the streets without their shadows.

It’s worth mentioning that parallel worlds don’t have to be futuristic. Kafka’s own work could be seen under the lens of the “Parallel World” – where what he’s revealing is that this distinctly alien setting is in fact not parallel at all, but our own. Even more clearly are the pastoral comedies of Shakespeare, where two worlds are established inside of a single narrative: the drab and rigid city life opposed to the fantastic, magical, and lively forests.

The parallel world is a tool, but it is a tool that establishes not just a setting. It inherently, without (or even against) the of from the author, sets up and deconstructs a binary: What is and what else may be.