Recently, more and more fantastic works and popular works have appeared, which describe alternative options for the development of human history. One of them is especially hotly debated - the option in which the Third Reich wins the Second World War and becomes the most powerful power in the world …
Anton Pervushin. Utopia Third Reich. If Hitler had won …
A MAN IN A HIGH CASTLE
Half a century ago, a great success came to a very extraordinary writer Philip Dick. In 1962, the future American science fiction classic published The Man in the High Castle, and a year later he was awarded the prestigious Hugo Literary Prize. It is believed that it was this work that prompted an avalanche of literary works in the genre of alternative history.
Dick's unusual work, in contrast to his cult novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", Which gave birth to the blockbuster "Blade Runner" back in 1982, was waiting for its adaptation for a long time. And now, to the 70th anniversary of the end of the bloodiest massacre in the history of mankind, the Internet company Amazon presented the pilot block of the first season of the series of the same name.
The main question of Dick's book, transferred to the screen: what would the world look like if the Axis countries had not suffered a crushing defeat in that war? How would Americans behave in an occupied continent? The paradoxical socio-political situation played out throughout all 10 episodes ultimately suggests not only rethinking all the ways of post-war development of society, science, technology and culture, but also thinking about the modern “forks in history” that are being born literally before our eyes.
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THE GREAT REICH AND THE STATES OF JAPAN
Dick created his novel in real time, and the events in it, accordingly, begin in 1962. The reader is immersed in an unreal world where the east of the North American continent, from New York to Texas, has been occupied by the “Great Nazi Reich” for 15 years. Local traitor collaborators torture patriots and the Fuhrer's posters are hung everywhere, instead of stars, a swastika froze on striped flags.
Dick's fantasy is originally based on the assassination of President Roosevelt at the end of the Great Depression. Subsequent presidents were too weak, and America plunged into the abyss of a new financial crisis, which spawned a policy of isolationism. Following this doctrine, the United States never sided with the anti-Hitler coalition, which led to its defeat. The German blitzkrieg was crowned with success, and the Soviet Union was occupied back in 1941.
This was followed by the attack on Pearl Harbor, which destroyed the backbone of the US Pacific Fleet. This opened the way for the Japanese occupation of Australia, New Zealand and Oceania.
Relations between the two new "great powers" remain tense. Around the terminally ill Fuhrer, like spiders in a bank, his minions are gnawing, and rumors are spreading among the American underground about some incomprehensible "cinema artifacts" that are being collected by the mysterious "mountain oracle" living in the "high castle" …
FILM CHRONICS AS A WEAPON OF RESISTANCE
Events revolve around a very strange documentary, telling about a completely different reality of our real world, where a Nazi hydra was crushed by the boot of a Soviet soldier ….
Everyone who comes in contact with an alternative history, captured on mysterious newsreel tapes, is tormented by questions: what is it really? Where did the pictures of a different reality come from? And why are they so needed by the "man from the high castle"?
In Dick's book there is also a third historical line connected with the novel "When the Locusts Have Eaten Up" - it is this work, based on secret newsreels, that creates the "mountain oracle" Hawthorne Abendsen. It describes another version of an alternative history, where on the eve of the war, Rexford Tugwell became the president of the United States.
He saved the Pacific Fleet, escaping the tragedy of Pearl Harbor, and ensured the US victory in naval battles. Great Britain, having defeated Rommel's troops in North Africa, makes a rush through Turkey to the Caspian and, together with the Red Army, wins the Battle of Stalingrad. At the end of the war, British tanks take Berlin by storm …
Many film critics immediately noted the spectacular ending of the first part of the series, where the meditating Japanese "trade minister" unexpectedly falls into the "real reality" of the early sixties with the impending Cuban Missile Crisis.
Here you can clearly see a kind of cinematic stamp, born of such films as "Time Patrol", "Back to the Future" and especially "The Matrix". The idea embedded in it could explain the contact of two such different realities as well as possible, although more interesting variants of the many-world can be found in modern science.
THE MULTIVERSE HYPOTHESIS
If science fiction writers, together with their readers, plunged into modern theoretical physics, they would certainly have experienced a shock from many variants of the “schizophrenic” Multiverse - a branching and splitting Universe. In such an endless world, you can find all possible options for the development of key historical events.
There are stories here with the death of Attila and Genghis Khan in childhood, the unsuccessful campaigns of Alexander the Great and the ordinary artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte. Our reality here appears to be equally probable, but far from the best of the worlds.
To understand the essence of the Multiverse, scientists have long been building virtual models of the Big Bang that gave birth to our universe, and trying to find a way to create new worlds when super-energetic particles collide in accelerators.
The theory of such worlds-particles was developed in due time by the outstanding Soviet academician Moisei Aleksandrovich Markov. He named his micro-universes "Friedmons" after the mathematician AA Friedman.
There are also scientific works that are more reminiscent of physical and mathematical science fiction. Among them, the theory of the Moscow physicist MB Mensky stands out, who believed that in a dream, each person unconsciously chooses the ways of realizing his future. There are other no less paradoxical versions of "crumbling reality", among which Juan Maldacena's hologram-worlds stand out.
THE WHOLE WORLD HOLOGRAM
Today physicists, cosmologists and astronomers argue hotly about whether our Universe is a familiar three-dimensional object or is it just a kind of "flat hologram". The Dutch theorist Gerard Hooft, who developed the "holographic principle", first spoke about such an incredible possibility in 1993.
According to Hooft's idea, our world can be represented in the form of a "universal two-dimensional hologram", on the surface of which absolutely all information about the landscape of the space-time surrounding us is recorded. Perceiving this information, we see not flat objects, but their three-dimensional images. Developing this principle, Professor Maldacena created in 1997 an original theory in which the basis of the universe is woven from incredibly thin "power superstrings".
These strings are holograms of events taking place in "flat space". In fact, we can talk about the fact that all the data that "paint" the volume of space that contains you or the whole Galaxy are hidden in the "flat basis of the present version" of the Universe.
If science fiction writers, together with their readers, plunged into modern theoretical physics, they would certainly have experienced a shock from many variants of the “schizophrenic” Multiverse - a branching and splitting Universe.
According to Hooft's idea, our world can be represented in the form of a "universal two-dimensional hologram", on the surface of which absolutely all information about the landscape of the space-time surrounding us is recorded.
The renowned quantum theorist Stephen Hawking explains the holographic principle using the example of credit cards containing holograms. There, on a two-dimensional surface, banks place the information necessary to describe the control three-dimensional object, excluding falsification of your account.
In Russian science fiction, the original picture of the Universe, in which all three Dick's realities could coexist, was created by science fiction writer Vladislav Krapivin in the epic “In the depths of the Great Crystal”. Krapivin's universe resembles a multidimensional crystal, on the edges of which holograms of other worlds are written, and the fourth dimension is not physical time, but a kind of "multivariance of development."
So can worlds so different in their history and so similar in content can coexist? Recently, physics programmers have created a unique model of the universe, where the principles of the famous "quantum teleportation" were preserved for the "flat holographic space". Are we really living in a holographic universe?
Oleg ARSENOV
