Alternative Realities

Samuel R. Delany wrote somewhere that every work of fiction is set in an alternative reality but that the difference is usually too small for us to notice. For example, we assume first that Poul Anderson's Manson Everard lives in New York and secondly that Everard's New York is indistinguishable from ours. However, it is distinguishable in at least one respect. Our New York has no Manson Everard living in it. The differences proliferate as the fiction is elaborated. Thus, our New York also had no couple called Farness living in an apartment overlooking Central Park in the 1930s. If an author were to base his characters entirely on real people and to describe only actions that those people had performed and events that they had experienced, then he would not be writing fiction! To be fiction, a narrative has to be alternative.

Although we can imagine that our real world coexists with worlds that we regard as fictional, the real world cannot be incorporated into any fictional multiverse. As soon as, e.g., Everard travels between universes and converses with Poul Anderson, then that Poul Anderson is a fictional/alternative one and not the one that is writing the story about Everard meeting Anderson. Alan Moore describes seeing his own fictional character, John Constantine, but the simplest explanation is that that was someone who resembled Constantine and who nodded knowingly at the author when he saw the latter staring at him. If I had been in Alan's position, then I would have chased after the guy to make sure...

We have referred to Delany, Anderson, Everard, the Farnesses, Moore and Constantine. These observations about the differences between fiction and reality could have been made with reference to any authors or characters, of course. However, these guys are particularly appropriate for such imaginative speculations. Is Anderson the first person narrator of his two Old Phoenix short stories? I think that there was some reason why not but I can't remember.