Every Man a Demiurge.

• Author: Kluepfel, Charles
• Position: Letters

Jesse Walker's "Every Man a Demiurge" (February) traces the rise and demise of an entertainment genre depicting reality as an illusion or simulation. A similar genre also had a smaller rise and fall during that time: the idea that our universe is but one of many in a multiverse, in which alternate universes are identical to ours up to a certain point but then diverge. Such alternate histories have been around for a while, such as in the collections edited by Greg Ben ford. In the '90s on television there was Sliders, with worlds in which the dinosaurs lived into modern times, the American Revolution never took place, or population control was enforced through soft drinks containing birth control chemicals and lotteries for killing off people.

On the movie screen there was Sliding Doors, where in one universe the protagonist just misses a...