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All those empty universes

"Hell's Gate" and "Hell Hath No Fury", by David, Linda Evans, and Joelle Presby, take the clash of science and magic to a whole new dimension...join us in a friendly discussion of this engrossing series!
Re: All those empty universes
Post by Howard T. Map-addict   » Thu Sep 26, 2013 10:24 am

Howard T. Map-addict
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tonyz, you are still Assuming: in this case that there
will - *must* - be megafauna, *except* when Humanity
or some intelligent life destroys it.

Perhaps Weber & Evans used a different Premise for their
Multiverse. Perhaps they never existed,
or they just naturally disappeared

Or perhaps we just haven't seen existing megafauna.
I don't recall any elephants or hippos, for example,
and I am in the process of rereading the books.
Perhaps the Arpathian herds include Aurochs.

I am trying to list everything they told us in the books,
and am *astounded* at all that they did not!
This story was intended for one volume, maybe 600 pages.
It required two, totalling 1250 pages.
Why should they insert even more data, Infodumps that
don't affect the Plot, just because you and I wonder?

HTM

tonyz wrote:It's not the absence of salience that's a problem. I have no difficulty with "humanity never showed up in the other universes". It's that we see the effects of humanity (I.e., the absence of megafauna, particularly in the New World -- e.g., mammoths), without their presence. Admittedly, maybe nobody has wondered about that in-character yet, but we specifically have a Sharonanzooloist exclaiming over new species, and an Arcanan who knows about dinosaurs, so both sides are doing some kind of research and ought to have aske dthemselves some of these questions.

And I fully understand that the authors can write about whatever universes they want to and this is mostly about the t human civilizations, not comparative paleontology/ecology, but I'm wondering about the in-universe explanation for how things just happened to work out so neatly.
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Re: All those empty universes
Post by tonyz   » Fri Sep 27, 2013 2:15 am

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Well, yes, I am assuming that. ;)

Again, I'm looking for an in-universe reason why things might be happening this way. Something that would cause portals to open(so far as we know) only in universes that look very much like the home universes but without humans.

In other words, how different are all these newly discovered universes?

If the answer is, the authors didn't worry about that, it's certainly possible, and probably likely, but it's not an in-universe answer ;)
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Re: All those empty universes
Post by cralkhi   » Tue Oct 22, 2013 8:50 pm

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It seems to me that the simple answer is that one of the non-human-hunting hypotheses about the Pleistocene megafauna extinction is true (in the Multiverse setting).
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Re: All those empty universes
Post by bkwormlisa   » Mon Jun 16, 2014 9:22 pm

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This sort of goes along with something I was wondering about. Andrin makes a reference to a huge volcano eruption thirty or forty years ago. In another thread it was mentioned that it sounded like Krakatoa, which I will accept as a working hypothesis. Thing is, Andrin refers to the fact that that eruption happened in every one of the known universes. It seems to me that universes that diverged millions of years ago (as I assume the lack of humans indicates) would have other differences. While I can believe that there would be a volcano in the same location in most or all of them, that it would erupt at the same time in worlds millions of years apart is absurd.

And yes, I'm fully aware that this sort of quibble is (like the megafauna one, which I hadn't thought of and is interesting) very much beside the point and would make the world-building way more complex. I expect it falls in the same category, that of something that the authors just didn't think worth worrying about. But it seemed appropriate to mention, given the rest of the thread.
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