Having foregrounded ideas of duality and alternate timelines in our AW17 campaign, this week we’re giving you some background viewing, as a companion piece for our campaign video, ‘Parallels.’
The idea of alternate worlds and parallel universes make for fertile creative territory, and their influence can be traced throughout much of the very finest popular culture. The notion of a universe which is like ours apart from just a few small details allows us to hold a mirror up to our own world and is something which always seizes the zeitgeist in periods of great change or political turmoil. Let us recommend our favourite duality-infused works of film, TV, and literature, from which you can find your own way through this fascinating area of creativity.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Has there ever been a writer capable of building more coherent, complete alternate worlds than Philip K. Dick? One of 20th-century sci-fi’s most powerful thinkers, Dick was able to create richly textured universes and alien worlds in fantastically short stories and novellas. The Man In The High Castle, one of his finest works, imagines a 1960s America under Axis rule, this universe’s version of the Second World War having been won by Japan and Nazi Germany. It’s a deeply unsettling, remarkably intricate vision of life in a totalitarian superstate, and like all the greatest science fiction, its implications run all-too-deep into our own universe.
Stranger Things
We couldn’t leave this out, could we? For the uninitiated, Stranger Things, which has just returned to Netflix for a second series, transports the viewer back to a mid-‘80s small-town America in which little is exactly as it seems. For all its numerous allusions to classic pop culture and pulp fiction – a dash of Spielberg here, a touch of The Exorcist there, all washed down with a generous splodge of The Goonies – this is spirited, fiercely original stuff, balancing a warm-hearted sense of adventure with fiery, gruesome potency when necessary.
Star Trek
The mothership of all alternate timelines, Star Trek began experimenting with the idea of split universes back with the original series in the 1960s with an episode aptly titled Mirror, Mirror which saw a mass murdering James T Kirk and a dastardly goatee-bearded Spock on the bridge of a radically different Starship Enterprise.
The idea has been revisited by various Trek series who have had fun with showing the darker side to their heroes and demonstrating how small decisions can have profound effects on the world at large.
The internet is currently ablaze with nerd speculation about Star Trek’s controversial latest series, 'Discovery' which in this week’s episode has ignited fan theories about whether it has been set in the Mirror Universe all along or if one (or a few) of the main characters are visitors from this villainous world.
Luckily for now, all you have to decide is what your style is going to be today but don’t underestimate the type of man you might become based on that choice…
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