Q & A Query (SPOILERS)

[EJA]

Okay, I'm reading Q & A at the moment, and there's just something that's nagging me. The prologue states that "They" periodically destroy every universe that comes along if it's inhabitants don't impress them. But later on in the book, lots of other universes become endangered at the same time as the "main" one. So do "They" wipe out entire multiverses rather than single universes at the end of every cycle? Kind of like the Conjunction of a Million Spheres in Michael Moorcock's fiction? Hope you can clear this up for me.

 

[KRAD]

Hm. Thinking about it, the term "multiverse" probably would've been more appropriate to use than "universe," but "universe" is a more generally recognized term -- "multiverse" is a little too Marvel Comics.

So to answer your question, yeah, They wipe out every damn thing and start all over.....

 

[Technobuilder]

EJA said:
Okay, I'm reading Q & A at the moment, and there's just something that's nagging me. The prologue states that "They" periodically destroy every universe that comes along if it's inhabitants don't impress them. But later on in the book, lots of other universes become endangered at the same time as the "main" one. So do "They" wipe out entire multiverses rather than single universes at the end of every cycle? Kind of like the Conjunction of a Million Spheres in Michael Moorcock's fiction? Hope you can clear this up for me.

I had the same question when I initially read Q&A, but assumed it was just what KRAD said. The term "Universe" used to describe the entirety of existence, thereby including all multiple realities and possibilities.

At least now I know that I was correct in my assumption.

 

[EJA]

Technobuilder said:

EJA said:
Okay, I'm reading Q & A at the moment, and there's just something that's nagging me. The prologue states that "They" periodically destroy every universe that comes along if it's inhabitants don't impress them. But later on in the book, lots of other universes become endangered at the same time as the "main" one. So do "They" wipe out entire multiverses rather than single universes at the end of every cycle? Kind of like the Conjunction of a Million Spheres in Michael Moorcock's fiction? Hope you can clear this up for me.

I had the same question when I initially read Q&A, but assumed it was just what KRAD said. The term "Universe" used to describe the entirety of existence, thereby including all multiple realities and possibilities.

At least now I know that I was correct in my assumption.

We're marvelous, aren't we?

 

[EJA]

KRAD said:
Hm. Thinking about it, the term "multiverse" probably would've been more appropriate to use than "universe," but "universe" is a more generally recognized term -- "multiverse" is a little too Marvel Comics.

So to answer your question, yeah, They wipe out every damn thing and start all over.....

But if the idea is that They wipe out entire universes because the inhabitants aren't "right" enough for Them...doesn't that imply that the inhabitants of all the universes turn out the same way as one another? No offense, but I can't help finding that a bit hard to swallow in light of what we already know about parallel universes. Being all independant of each other, they could never all reach the same conclusion.

 

[LightningStorm]

EJA said:
But if the idea is that They wipe out entire universes because the inhabitants aren't "right" enough for Them...doesn't that imply that the inhabitants of all the universes turn out the same way as one another?

I don't think that implies anything like that. It simply states that They don't like the inhabitants of any of the "universes" that exist.

For a much much smaller comparison, if you had say a million different items and didn't like any of them, that does not imply that all million items are (say) apples. You might have an apple, an orange, a computer, a chair, a desk, a car, a... etc.

 

[Smiley]

Let's face it. They are very capricious beings, and They will do whatever They want to do.

One thing I wonder about is how long They will give Picard's multiverse before subjecting it to another trial.

 

[Ronald Held]

AFAIK, Julie Schwartz invented the term Multiverse for the DCU. It was used at DC long before it appeared in research papers.

 

[Christopher]

Well, despite the tendency to use the terms interchangeably, alternate timelines are not separate universes. They're different quantum states of our universe. Our universe was born and then began diverging into different timelines, different histories. But all those histories are part of the same universe, descended from the same origin. Destroy that universe and you destroy all its timelines, all its histories, all its Jean-Luc Picards and Datas and Messrs. Mot. But it's just one universe. Or multiverse, if you prefer. (Which is an etymologically questionable word; "universe" means "one from many," so "multiverse" actually means "many many.")

A different universe would be a completely different place. It wouldn't be a place where the same planets and people exist but they're evil instead of good or they all wear cowboy hats. It would have different galaxies, different planets, different species -- maybe even different laws of physics that don't allow those things to exist in the first place. (In Trek, a good example of a different universe would be Species 8472's fluidic space.)

 

[EJA]

^ I think there's some indication that whole other universes could develop in similar ways to one another. There's the instances where the Trekverse crossed over with the Marvel Universe (in Star TreX, Second Contact, and Planet X), and that had humans in it.

 

[Christopher]

^^But those are apocryphal stories that aren't meant to represent anything that "really" happened in the Trekverse. They don't count.

 

[DS9forever]

Could I go a bit off topic and ask if the planet Gaia is the one seen in DS9: Children of Time?

 

[EJA]

Christopher said:
^^But those are apocryphal stories that aren't meant to represent anything that "really" happened in the Trekverse. They don't count.

Couldn't the same thing be said for all the Trek literature, Q & A included?

 

[David Mack]

^ How to win friends and influence people in the TrekLit forum, ladies and gentlemen.

 

[EJA]

Talking of Q & A, why is Q so concerned about the survival of the universe? After all, I think it's been established in other fiction (e.g. Mike Friedman's Q Continuum trilogy, Planet X, and Peter David's Missing in Action) that the Q have access to all universes. And in the epilogue to Missing in Action, Q and his son are actually shown to exist outside all the universes (multiverse?) and even destroy one such universe themselves.

 

[KRAD]

As I said, They would destroy the entire multiverse and start from scratch. That includes the Q-continuum, as Q himself said in the book.

 

[Quimby]

I just wanted to mention how much I loved the sequence near the end of Q & A with the little vignettes giving us peaks of other Trek universes. I am an alternate universe junky and literally could have read and enjoyed an entire book in that format.

 

[JD]

Have you read Q-Squared? The whole book jumps back and forth between our universe and two others.

 

[EJA]

KRAD said:
As I said, They would destroy the entire multiverse and start from scratch. That includes the Q-continuum, as Q himself said in the book.

So in your imagination, all those alternate Enterprises near the end are from alternate universes within a multiverse, rather than alternate quantum timelines within a single universe?

 

[Christopher]

EJA said:
So in your imagination, all those alternate Enterprises near the end are from alternate universes within a multiverse, rather than alternate quantum timelines within a single universe?

*sigh* Those are just different ways of describing the same thing: the first is a vernacular description, the latter more technical. It's not an either-or question.