Note btw that most science fiction is only cosmetically a building of alternative worlds. Much of the average stuff is simple relabeling. The better ones just acknowledge it openly.
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An example of doing more is Dark Materials, where cosmetic similarities suggest a glitchy parallel universe that’s not quite like ours. Deepness in the Sky also pulls that off by constructing an uncanny valley of spider-beings whose story is told via overwrought human mapping.
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I’ve been trying to systematize these intuitions by playing with situated archetypes that work across a whole class of worlds rather than inducing a specific one. Then you suggest the whole universe via “beat” frequencies that emerge in juxtaposition with a familiar universe
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Getting back to history, a narrative is only a history if it’s not in an end-of-history identitarian consensus equilibrium. Good fiction has the feel of history.
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It’s not enough that the world changes (plot) or characters grow individually or in mutuality. The world and characters must change together in, for want of a better term, Turing complete ways. Even a strange attractor or brownian motion won’t do.
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It’s the entanglement that evolves irreversibly. And the characters don’t have to be “rich” in a literary sense for this. In fact that’s often a liability. Even 2d caricatures that are terrible by rules of “good” character dev can drive historic narrative if entangled right
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This stuff is very hard. That’s why only a few cases have been solved analytically. For example evil twins from evil parallel universes who differ in social identity only by a goatee (van dyke actually...) is a surprisingly sophisticated device if you dig a bit into it.
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“Good” and “evil” are shorthand codes/world-hashes for 2 different narrative equilibria, with a leak in either direction capable of restarting history. Good/evil is a property of the *entanglement* between the characters and home universes.
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Importantly, social identity is *only* an address. That is why a trivial marker (facial hair) works to distinguish the two universes. It happens to be gendered but that’s unimportant. It could be a nongendered trait like long hair.
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Interestingly, Marxist thought gets this whole idea in a degenerate way: “none of us is free until all of us are free” or “the oppressor requires liberation as much as the oppressed.” That’s a good special case of entangled history.
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Where it fails is treating aspects of the context, like class, as immutable. A workers paradise isn’t classless. It’s a degenerate one-class, end-of-history society. To transcend class-structure, you need something with equal expressive power that preserves Turing-completeness.
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Replying to @vgr
History doesn’t restart. Fukuyama looks like a dumbass for claiming it’s end. If it were to restart, truly impossible, it would only open us up to the same damn stories occurring over and over with even less self awareness or hope of transcendence.
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