Stephen King: Physics and His Universe Two

To understand the vastness of what Stephen King has built, one must realize that his stories span a myriad of times, places, and even dimensions.  For example,  The Green Mile takes place in the first half of the last century.  Black House takes place (for the most part) in Wisconsin.  The Standtakes place in America, but obviously in a different reality than the rest of his Tales.  (for those unfamiliar, an epidemic called, among other things, Superflu wipes out 99% of the world’s population in the beginning of the book.)  The Dark Tower series, The Talisman, Black House, and a few others take us to an entire different series of realities.  (we’ll touch on that in a bit)     Many authors have created alternate realities;  Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, for example.  But never in fiction has anyone created one on such a grand scale.  How was this accomplished?  How did King manage to intertwine so many possible realities and not lose any of the credibility of the tale?  He created what is called a multiverse. 

The multiverse (or meta-universe(metaverse)) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including our universe) that together comprise all of reality. The different universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes. The structure of the multiverse, the nature of each universe within it and the relationship between the various constituent universes, depend on the specific multiverse hypothesis considered.  (wikipedia)    

This is not a unique concept by King… man has been tossing this theory around in some form or other for centuries.  What he did was put his own spin on it, and do so in a way that was accessible and understandable.  And while others have theorized and speculated on the concept, he has gone about constructing his multiverse from the figurative ground up, and shared it with the masses.     There are many versions of the alternate realities theory, and Kings is by far one of the more plausible.  Below is a rudimentary diagram…

Now imagine that each of the circles is actually a wheel, each with twelve spokes.  At the center of the wheels… basically the hub of all space and time, lies the pinnacle and centerpiece of the entire King multiverse;  The Dark Tower.

All 12 of the beams flow out from the tower, (There are technically 6, but each is split in two by the tower), and ecah represents one reality.   Keep in mind that they aren’t completely separate… for example, if you walked a half mile from the tower in one particular direction, you may not have completely entered into an exclusive reality… there is a significant amount of blurring in the area of the tower.  There are beings, human and otherwise, who inhabit this realm, and inter-reality travel does occur.  Some because travelers from the tower area seek other realities with intent… The character Randall Flagg, who made his first appearance in The Stand, also made appearances in Eyes of the Dragon and Hearts in Atlantis, and traveled the beams extensively through the saga.  Other times, the realities simply have “weak spots”… some created, as in “The Mist”, others natural, as in “The Langoliers”.          

We will discuss some of the characters who play roles in the overall story in time, but first the protagonist of the tale… Roland Deschain.  Roland Deschain is Mid-World’s final gunslinger. Like a knight from the Arthurian legends of our world, Roland is on a quest. His “grail” is the Dark Tower, the aforementioned linchpin of the Time/Space continuum, and his goal is to climb to its very top and question the god or demon who resides there. Roland’s world is unraveling.

The Beams that maintain the proper alignment of time, space, size and dimension are breaking down and the Tower itself is foundering. This structural instability affects all worlds, but in Roland’s, the symptoms are dramatic. As the fabric of reality wears away, thinnies form and spread. These squalling mist bogs swallow all those that stumble into them, letting their captives fall into the dark no-places between worlds. As the landscape stretches, directions drift. What is west today may be southwest tomorrow and southeast the day after. A goal that lay only fifty miles away can suddenly become a hundred, or even a thousand miles distant.  As the direct descendant of Arthur Eld, King of All-World-That-Was, and as Mid-World’s last dinh, Roland must rescue his land from annihilation. But his task is gargantuan. He must find a way to safeguard the framework, the loom, upon which the interpenetrating realities are woven.

But in order to do so — in order to shore up that central Tower and the Beams which radiate out from it — he must find his way across a landscape so fragmented that neither map nor memory can help him pinpoint his destination. In fact, Roland does not even know where the Tower stands. He realizes that he must head toward a place called End-World.  And so the stage is set.  In part three we will look at Rolands journey and more of the tie ins amongst Kings jorney, and begin to see the map as the weaving tightens, and King’s world, so many years, novels and memorable characters in the making… and the convergence as they come together in an epic crescendo.

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Stephen King: Physics and His Universe