Entangled Temporalities of Multiverse Narrative: Life’s Lottery by Kim Newman

Grzegorz Maziarczyk

doi:10.18290/rh227011.5

Grzegorz Maziarczyk John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6859-1527

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh227011.5

Keywords: Kim Newman, Life’s Lottery, gamebook, temporality, multiverse, unnatural narratology

Abstract

Drawing on recent developments in unnatural narratology, this paper reads entangled temporalities of Kim Newman’s gamebook novel Life’s Lottery in relation to David Deutsch’s quantum theory of the multiverse. The forking narrative structure of the novel, which allows the reader to influence how a particular storyline will develop by choosing from a set of predetermined options, subverts such commonly assumed characteristics of time as unidirectionality and immutability, and undermines classical narratological models of temporal relations between story and discourse. In Life’s Lottery time constantly branches into contradictory timelines, which not only run in parallel but also crisscross one another and loop upon themselves, thus allowing transition between universes and times. Far from a mere exercise in narrative interactivity, a complex multiverse thus created can be construed as a paradoxically verisimilar representation of life’s contingency.

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