Making Universes: Cosmology in Science Fiction

Modern cosmology, in its study of the origin and nature of the universe, provides a rich field of speculative thought for the writer of science fiction. Theories that add general dimensions to time and the three known dimensions of space, or that contemplate time flowing in reverse, give plenty of scope to the imagination.

Current thought portrays the birth of the cosmos occurring some fifteen billion years ago in a great explosion arising from a superdense zone the size of our own solar system, or perhaps even from a singular point source. This dense zone would have comprised the totality of existence, with nothing outside or beyond it.

The speculations of particle physicists link with those of cosmologists in the study of the first instants of this "big bang," when elementary particles were being created. The "physics of the very small" has produced ideas of particular appeal to science fiction authors--for example, the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics where every single particle event gives rise to a whole universe, thus generating an infinite multiplicity of branching universes.

Alternatively, only one particle may exist and its eternal dance back and forth through time might be responsible for the mass of the universe. In this "dance of the particles" theory modern science and traditional Eastern philosophy converge. Then again, the universe we can observe may only be a portion of a macro-universe. In other zones, conditions may be different from what they are here.

After the "big bang," matter rushed away from the center of the explosion. Our universe still continues to expand, but if its mass is great enough, gravitational pull will eventually slow and reverse this explosive expansion. Fifty to a hundred billion years from now all the mass and space of the universe would be crushed back into a superdense zone or point from which a new universe might burst outward, but one which need not possess the same physical constants as ours, and thus need not give rise to galaxies, stars, or life.

Is it, therefore, coincidence that our universe is ideally suited to life capable of observing the phenomena around it? Do barren universes with no observers stretch before and after us? Or is reality somehow "participatory"? We know that the observer's consciousness is bound up intimately with quantum physical events. Does this apply cosmologically as well?

The use of cosmology as a central theme in science fiction has, until recently, been less than one might expect (apart from visionary moments in tales about other topics). Perhaps this slight is understandable: The grand scale of cosmology cannot easily be reconciled with the scale of human events and characters, which must necessarily be dealt with in a work of fiction. Perhaps the most comprehensively ambitious, imaginative, and up-to-date treatment of cosmology in fiction remains Olaf Staplendon's Star Maker (1937).

Staplendon's narrator undertakes a dreamlike (yet intensely convincing) journey through our universe, much of the time in rapport with alien intelligences. The travelers survey the tragic, yet exaltatory, rise (and subsequent decline) of civilizations toward a cosmic mind. This rise culminates in a detailed vision of the moving spirit who is behind all successive cosmos. The "Maker" is a creative artist, who flexes his muscles by imagining the cosmos into existence. First, he conjectures up immature "soap bubbles" of universes--where, say, space is represented by something akin to music, or where antigravity drives everything asunder, or where the cosmos is a continuous fluid in which creatures swim.

Cosmology In Science Fiction

Our own universe comes toward the end of this period. The Maker then moves through more mature, but always varied, creations toward the ultimate and subtlest cosmos of all. Although "he" increasingly rejoices in his creations, the Maker is by no means motivated by the charity or benevolence one anthropomorphically associates with a God. Perhaps he is indeed "Godlike": that is, beyond good and evil. Stapledon's narrator frequently recoils in horror at what seems to him sheer caprice, and even diabolical malice. Yet he cannot help but marvel at the grandeur of the Maker's creations, and he finally glimpses a fleeting yet stunning insight into the goal of these creations.

Stapledon's compatriot, Arthur Clarke, inherited his style and theme. In Childhood's End (1954) Clarke evokes the evolution of cosmic mind, while in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) he explores how super-intelligences might intervene to propel life toward intelligence and transcendence. Clarke is a strange and effective amalgam of both intellectual, technological rationality and emotional mysticism. For him old style religion and belief in a "God" is anathema, a dreadful hindrance to progress. Yet in his fictions about the evolution toward super-intelligence, he constantly percolates the feeling of spirituality. In Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise (1979), the alien supercomputer fly-by probe Starglider teasingly informs the human race that the origin of the universe has indeed been discovered by the probe's manufacturers, but that it does not have appropriate circuits to comprehend this. Since Starglider's machine intelligence seems of a rather high order, the origin of the universe must be either very complicated or essentially paradoxical. Despite his "cosmic" scope, however, Clarke does not in fact engage in much actual cosmology.

Another approach an author may take is to invoke cosmology and then "cop out" into action-adventure. Science fiction is an entertainment medium, with commercial pressure to entertain--preferably by vigorous action and emotional conflict. This is the case with Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series, which is comprised of Maker of Universes (1965), The Gates of Creation (1966), A Private Cosmos (1967), Behind the Walls of Terra (1970), and The Lavalite World (1977). In this series, a group of squabbling, petty-minded "Lords" with access to super-science live in private, artificial pocket-universes, universes of some ingenuity and much scope for adventure. Our own solar system is in fact one of the Lords' creations and is modeled quite closely on their own solar system. However, it transpires that their solar system is artificial too, manufactured by some unknown power. Everything beyond the orbit of Pluto (theirs as well as ours) is merely a simulation, an illusion. Having discovered this when they tried to send a starship to the nonexistent stars, and having somehow deduced the methods though not the motives of the missing manufacturer, the Lords proceed to create their own capricious micro-universes by a process that is seen as analogous to blowing up a balloon in non-space, then "gating through" progressively larger creation machines. The five volumes are mainly devoted to the colorful vendettas of the Lords.

Farmer's masterpiece, The Unreasoning Mask (1981), is an entirely more serious, ambitious, and skillfully written treatment of cosmology. In this novel, many universes coexist, each a "cell" in the body of a growing "God," who is still at an infantile stage. The only way that God the metauniverse can mature is if creatures arise within its constituent universes who can communicate with it, and thus make it self-aware. However, instantaneous travel by humans and aliens occurs by shortcuts through its cell-walls, disrupting them; and without being aware of the life inside it, the baby God's body has unleashed a destroyer of life, a roving antibody that bombards inhabited worlds. Already God has died twice, prematurely. Farmer's portrayal of the metauniverse is scientifically plausible. On to this he grafts Islamic--specifically, Sufi--concepts of existence, by no means inappropriately in view of the cosmic speculations of the medieval Islamic thinkers Ibn Arabi and Rumi.

Poul Anderson's Tau Zero (1967) offers the archetypal scenario of an expanding-collapsing-expanding cosmos, viewed from on board a starship that accelerates out of control. The faster the ship goes, the more time contracts for those on board. In proportion, the evolution of the universe speeds up outside until eventually the whole cosmos collapses back into a superdense monobloc. After this, a fresh universe expands in which at last the ship can slow down and colonize a suitable world. This time-contraction is perfectly in accord with Fitzgerald's and Lorentz's equations of relativistic velocities--those velocities closely approaching the speed of light. However, one cannot travel outside of a collapsing universe, flying in some kind of vacant space and watching the collapse. All of spacetime collapses in the process, and since the ship is contained in spacetime it would be included in the super-hot, super-dense monobloc, and thus would be destroyed.

Can one, with sufficient ingenuity, survive the collapse of one universe and experience the expanding phases of a successive universe? Can one even influence the nature of the new universe?

The final volume of James Blish's Cities in Flight tetralogy, The Triumph of Time (1958), concludes with a plan to outlive the annihilation of our universe; this annihilation will be caused by the impending collision between our cosmos and a corresponding time-reversed cosmos of antimatter. By reaching the "hub" of the universe, the metagalactic center, and briefly enduring the moment of annihilation while protected by a force-field, it will be possible for the characters to create new universes out of the material of their own spacesuits and bodies (dying in the process). A space-suited body, projected into absolute nothingness, will impose its own spacetime metric, thus creating space to accommodate it. Discharging oxygen bottles into this space will produce a plasma akin to the original hydrogen plasma of our universe. Discharging the suit's energy by pushing the self-destruct button will "touch a match to the explosion" and produce a new universe akin to ours. This universe will only be fifty light years across, but eventually continuous creation of atoms from the void will result in mass sufficient to produce a superdense monobolc, which can expand again into a larger universe. The hero of the book, in the end, decides against producing a standard model of a universe, and presses his destructor button to let all the elements of his body and suit flash into plasma at the same instant. Naturally, he will never know the result of his experiment.

George Zabrowski's Macrolife (1979) is an ambitious and propagandist account of the future of space habitats and human evolution. The story is set in the years 2021, 3000, and one hundred billion years later. In its final heroic and visionary section, an earlier character is given back his separate individuality in order to face the crisis of the end of the universe. By this date all planetary life is long since dead, and only "macro-worlds"--human and alien star-faring habitats--survive throughout the meta-galaxy. The whole dying universe is collapsing back toward the ultimate black hole. This void is embedded in the super-space in which all universes swim, and from it a new universe will explode in a quantum fireball, generating new space and mater, which will perhaps obey different laws. By orbiting they event horizon of a lesser black hole it may be possible, because of time contraction, to await the merging of all black holes into the ultimate rotating monobloc, and then to move through a navigable aperture "where centrifugal forces balance the crushing effects of gravitations collapse." Collapse to a point of infinite density and zero volume will not quite occur; before this occurs "quantum effects will come into play, preventing ultimate collapse . . .[and] expansion into new space will begin." (The "quantum effects" here are the phenomenon known as "tunneling," by which one twin from a particle pair will escape through the event horizon of a hole; in the case of small holes, this process rapidly erodes them). However, this enterprise will cost the macro-worlds most of their energy, maybe too much. "Eternal" macro-life, which has survived for tens of billions of years, is not used to taking such all-or-nothing risks; this is why the character from the earlier era has been reconstructed out of the linked, hyper-personal aggregates of individuals--systems of minds--which have ultimately evolved. Only a finite "primitive" would risk such a choice.

During the dark and terrifying transition much of macro-life falls apart, but in the new universe the survivors meet with a giant cluster of unknown macro-worlds that preceded them through the black hole/white hole. This macro-life is from an even earlier cycle of the universe. It did not reveal itself earlier lest it influence its successors' youthful development. Now it opens up to welcome the survivors, "graduates' of the ultimate test of life and intelligence; the collapse of our own universe.

Zebrowski's science (of gravitational collapse, and black hole recycling into white hole--the "big bang" of a new universe) is all kosher according to our contemporary under standing. The moral--that intelligence can survive from universe to universe--is obviously more user-friendly than Olaf Stapledon's vision of cosmic creations.

In Frederik Pohl's Heechee series, the Heechee are an advanced race who have left a starship base in the solar system. Emerging humanity begins to exploit this base at great risk to the pilots. At the end of the second volume, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980), we learn that the enigmatic, vanished Heechee are in fact holed up inside a large artificial black hole of their own construction--for security, and in order to let time pass faster. The Heechee have discovered that distant galaxies are slowing down inexplicably and the 3^ok cosmic radiation background is beginning to "drift." Someone--something--is prematurely reversing the expansion of the universe, with the apparent aim of producing a new universe where physical conditions are different to those in ours. In the books' sequel, Heechee Rendezvous, humans begin to draw attention to themselves by trespassing into other black holes, to the horror of the Heechees. We realize that intelligence from a previous and differently structured cycle of the universe has survived into our universe, which is physically out of tune with it, and this intelligence is trying to arrange, by fine-tuning, the next cycle of the cosmos to suit itself rather than Heechees or humans.

All physical processes are theoretically time-reversible. That is to say, the chronological equations describing any particle events can operate just as well in reverse. There is no 'arrow of time' built into physical law as a fundamental requirement. Yet we perceive the universe as evolving in one direction only through time, from past to future. Why should time behave thus?

In An Age (1967), subsequently re-titled Cryptozoic, Brian Aldiss supposes that in fact time flows in the opposite direction, but that due to mass delusion we imagine otherwise. At one time a magnificent over-mind existed, but now it is devolving. Life is becoming more primitive. The terrible shock of this dissolution has so traumatized the "future" human race that, in a kind of collective hysteria, it has reversed its time-sense. Hitherto the time-reversed cosmos has been benign; it is far less tragic to awake from death with one's full powers and, eventually shedding the burden of knowledge and experience, to be reabsorbed into the mother. Yet now a "future" of a declining barbarism awaits us: devolution through primitive man, to pre-intelligent life, to nothingness.

This ingenious reversal of the normal order of events is also the theme (at least in its social implications) of Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World (1967). However, it is the professional plasma-astrophysicist and author Gregory Benford, who, in Timescape (1980), tackled the actual scientific and cosmological implications of time-reversal. Of all novels, Timescape is perhaps the most realistic portrayal of the actual processes of science. It is also extremely well written.

In Timescape, the world of 1998 is on the verge of being rendered uninhabitable by ecological catstrophe, due to earlier pollution. Two particle scientists attempt to send a message of warning back through time, to the year 1962. They will use tachyons ("fast ones," from the Greek), particles that are genuinely theorized to exist though still undetect6ed, and perhaps undetectable by definition. The Theory of Relativity does not permit any particles possessing mass to accelerate up to the speed of light; if so, they would attain infinite power. But it does allow for the existence of particles that can only travel faster than light, and that would gain prohibitive mass as they slow down. These tachyon particles might travel backwards through time. Benford's scientists use tachyons to introduce interference patterns that can be decoded into a 1962 physics experiment.

The success of the scientists' experiment causes the universe where the message was received and acted on to split apart from the universe where no message was noted or heeded. Thus those who sent the message cannot benefit, but their "twins" in the other future universe (with subtly altered history, where Kennedy was shot by Oswald but did not die) are busy revising cosmology to include the role of tachyons. Tachyons propagating hind-wards through time are absorbed at last by the earlier universe that, smaller and denser, is closer to the start of its expansion. Finally (and paradoxically, in the beginning), the original monobloc absorbs all tachyons. Their combined energy gives it enough heat to fuel the expansion. "Thus the universe exploded from a single point because of what would happen, not what had." At the same time, tachyons are "causality waves looping between past and future," thus each loop can cause a branching of the whole universe.

Alternative Universes

A large sub-genre within science fiction concerns parallel universe, each with loops of paradox that force alternative histories into existence. A bibliography complied by Barton Hacker and Gordon Chamberlain, entitled "Pasts That Might Have Been," was published in the academic science fiction criticism journal Extrapolation in 1981. It annotated no fewer than forty-two pages of entries: novels, short stories, and also works of speculative history an economics; alternative "counterfactual" history is proving a useful tool for economic theorists. Many science fiction tales are primarily concerned with social changes in the present resulting from, for instance, the Confederacy winning the American Civil War, or the Spanish Armada trouncing Elizabethan England. However, by offering a scientific rationale, "the many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory has spurred science fiction authors to consider the possible technology of travel into alternative worlds, and the resulting cosmological implication.

Thus in Gerg Bear's Eon (1985), a 300 kilometer-long asteroid habitat arrives in Earth orbit, having looped back from a subtly alternative future. Inside the habitat, the final section turns out to be of infinite length. The human builders originally set out to travel slower than the speed of light, to the stars, but en route discovered how to create an infinite, self-sustaining, tude-like singularity constructed from the fabric of spacetime itself. Thus they are able to open gates directly to suitable inhabited planets located in alternative universes.

Unfortunately, one pushy alien species has already colonized their "way" ahead of them. This leads to war, which forces the descendants of the builders to accelerate their traveling city to near light-speed along the singularity, with destructive yet wonderful consequences.

There are an infinite number of world-lines, and because of this one human artifact, an infinite number of connections between them. Our researchers devise schemes to allow us to cross over to other Ways, other super-sets of world-lines . . . . There are Ways where the beings of thousands of completely different universes hold commerce, exchanging in some cases only information in other cases actually exchanging different types of space-time.

In a very real--if esoteric--sense, the fundamental structure of the universe and of space-time is mathematical, an equation of energies rather than any tangible substance. Rudy Rucker, a direct descendant of the philosopher Hegel and a mathematician specializing in infinity and multiple dimensions, is the author of studies of Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension (1977), and Infinity and the Mind (1982). In his high-spirited science fiction such as Spacetime Donuts (1981), Masters of Space and Time (1984), and stories collected in The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka (1983), he plays sprightly, but mathematically legitimate, games with the infinite, and with higher dimensions, and with the structure of spacetime.

Why should our universe consist of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension? In 1984 Edwin Abbot's Flatland supposed a world of two dimensions, length and breadth--plus time. In 1984 A.K. Dewdney, a professor of computer science, published The Planiverse. This novel purported to record computer contact with a two-dimensional world that consisted of length and height but no breadth, and it worked out an ingenious cosmology for a two-dimensional expanding cosmos.

In fact, according to the latest thinking, our own universe may well consist of the three dimensions we know, time, and seven other dimensions that exist as tiny compacted whorls wrapped up sub-microscopically. We may already live in an eleven-dimensional universe.

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Memory of Whiteness (1985) plays a stylish variation of the theme of additional micro- (and macro-) dimensions. He grafts a whole new sub-basement of particle physics onto this variation, supposing persuasively that quarks are not indeed the ultimate constituents of matter, as we suppose today, but are themselves built of even tinier "glints." This novel beautifully intersects physics and music across a believable, kaleidoscopic, intrigue ridden solar system, where each discipline stunningly illuminates the other. The culmination is a chilling vision of an eternally recurring universe, where all events happen again and again, in cycle after cycle, inflexibly predetermined. We play the same symphony time and again, imperfectly, unable to deviate from the prescribed score. How very different this seems from the infinite number of freely willed possibilities apparently available in Greg Bear's cosmos!

In 1968 Charles Harness published The Ring of Ritornel, a cosmic seesaw between the claims of chance and the claims of inflexible destiny, regarding who ruled the universe. In Robert Silverberg's 1975 novel, The Stochastic Man, the acquisition of foreknowledge is added to the brew of "a universe in which nothing is random . . . all is predictable on every level . . . predetermined and necessary and inevitable." Silverberg's characters taste "the sweet comfort of the foreordained." Harness' approach is sophisticated "space opera" laced with cosmological speculations; Silverberg's is existential; Robinson's allies music to particle physics and the mathematics of many dimensions. Yet perhaps the seeming freedom of "many worlds" and the determinism of an inflexible time-line of events are not so much at odds after all. For might it not be, if all possible events occur in an infinity of alternative universes, that each universe taken individually is indeed internally deterministic, since it consists of exactly the subset of events that is excluded and enforced by the contrary events that occur in the sum total of all other universes?

Here cosmology collides with philosophy--from which indeed it arose in ancient Greece and the East. It returns as the "dance" revealed by the giant particle accelerators' mirrors, as the patterns of ancient philosophy and religion, and as theories of the nature of the universe. Once again, mind and consciousness are invited into the equation of existence. A story such as Michael Bishop's "close Encounter with the Deity" in the 1986 collection of the same title fuses cosmology and religion in a way which movingly illuminates each.

For ingeniously aberrant cosmologies we may turn to Barington Bayley, in such stories as "The Exploration of Space" and "Me and My Antronoscope," both contained in his collection The Knights of the Limits (1978). In the former, we discover that our universe of continuous spacetime is unusual-it appears chaotic and unorganized to explorers from a universe of non-continuous space-time where motion from A to B is instantaneous, resembling moves on a chess board. In the latter story, the universe consists not of vacuum with occasional islands of matter in it, as ours does, but rather of infinite solid rock with occasional caverns in it. The inhabitants find these caverns either by tunneling physically or by using the "antronoscope" of the title, which is an instrument designed to peer from a distance into caves and hollows throughout the rock.

In Bayley's The Star Virus (1970), space freebooters capture a crystal ball constructed by ancient alien beings--or perhaps by extra dimensional entities--which contains the original of our own galaxy in it. The galaxy we know is merely the macroscopic copy. Collision with Chronos (1973) has two quite different evolutionary histories for the Earth. One of them--ours--proceeds from our past to the present. In the other, alien evolution deploys from our distant future towards the present. The two time-streams are about to collide. In The Fall of Chronopolis (1974), time-navies of the Chronotic Empire patrol time to erase errors of history and engage in combat with other time-faring civilization of the future.

M.K. Joseph's The Hole in the Zero (1967) plays surreal games with "un-space," a region of randomness where literally anything is possible. Subsequently, astrophysicists would speculate that a naked singularity--a black hole without the hole, as it were--theoretically could project anything whatever into existence. This idea is exploited by Ian Watson in The Gardens of Delight (1980). Watson also supposes in The Jonah Kit (1975) that our cosmos may be no more than en echo, a shadow, of the original creation. In his Black Current trilogy, concluding with The Book of Being (1985), the whole universe fluctuates in and out of existence every moment--an Islamic notion that Watson already touched on in God's World (1979). The universe consists of particles called "elections" (in contrast to "elections'), which are infinitesimal circles of space rolled up very compactly--those same theorized micro-dimensions. Generally the totality of election elect, or choose, to be exactly what they have always been, thus constantly, recreating reality. His Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986) explores adjacent universes where the rules of games, such as Chess and Go, form a matrix for reality.

Science fiction exploits actual state-of-art cosmology (whether the steady-state theory, the exploding model, or the many-worlds interpretation) while also going down bizarre, inventive pathways. Yet, although we think, scientifically, that we are almost at the state of discovering the actual nature and origin of our universe, we should never forget Haldane's remark to the effect that the universe may not only be stranger than we think, but may even be stranger than we can possibly think.

The recent history of particle physics is one of progressive disclosure (or creation, in accelerators by mathematics) of deeper and deeper hierarchies of fundamental objects. Meanwhile our most powerful telescopes (plus the new astronomies of neutrinos and X-rays) disclose ever more on the macroscopic scale.

As the mathematician G. Spencer Brown concluded in his Laws of Form (1969),

In respect of its own information, the universe must expand to escape the telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us. The snake eats itself; the dog chases its tail. Thus the world . . . must always seem to us, its representatives, to be playing a kind of hide-and-seek with itself. What is revealed will be concealed, but what is concealed will again be revealed.

Science fiction engages in this serious game of hide-and-seek with gusto and ingenuity, creating worlds and universes that reflect the biggest question we can ask: Why does anything exist at all? Why is there a universe?