Term originally coined outside sf as an alternative to "universe" that supposedly avoided any presupposition of a unique and ordered creation. Its first recorded use was in 1897 by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910); the UK physicist Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) applied it to the universe of Physics in 1904, and it also appears in the works of G K Chesterton and John Cowper Powys. Michael Moorcock reinvented the word for sf in "The Blood Red Game" (May 1963 Science Fiction Adventures), where it stands for the totality of all possible alternate universes or Parallel Worlds. Placing such worlds in the common framework of the multiverse implies the possibility of contact, interaction and travel between alternate realities. This meaning, reinforced by very frequent restatement in Moorcock's later sf and especially Fantasy, is now commonly used in both sf and sf criticism. In his Manifold sequence, Stephen Baxter borrows a term from Mathematics – specifically, topology – and refers to this sheaf of possible universes as the Manifold. [DRL]
see also: Dimensions.
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