Sunday, March 25, 2007

"Approaching Zero" - by Kelly Parks

I love Alternate History stories but it started bothering me the way they all focused on alternate outcomes for recent human history. All of human existence on Earth is a brief instant compared to the age of Earth itself. What about some alternate outcomes in the deep past? Wouldn’t the multiverse of all alternate histories consist mostly of those alternatives? Places where the Snowball Earth era never ended or where the collision with a Mars sized body (that created the moon and stripped the early Earth of most of its volatiles) never happened.

That line of thought lead me to the conclusion that alternate histories where the south won the civil war or Rome never fell might be very hard to find among the many alternate universes where humanity never evolved at all.

Kelly Parks

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