Hollywood has turned the multiverse into an excuse to bring back dead characters and sell more toys. That drives me crazy, because it’s one of the richest ideas in fiction and almost nobody treats it seriously anymore.
Once a multiverse story can bring back any dead character, no death costs anything, and “what if everything is possible” becomes the writer’s excuse to avoid making choices. Storytelling is nothing but choices, and a writer who won’t make them has wasted one of the richest ideas in fiction.
What separates a good multiverse story from a bad one is whether the writer was willing to let something be permanent. Plenty of very talented writers weren’t, and their stories went soft the moment the audience figured out nothing would stick.
Why do writers love the multiverse?
Hollywood has turned the multiverse into an excuse to bring back dead characters and sell more toys.
The appeal is obvious. The multiverse gives you infinite versions of your characters, infinite timelines, infinite consequences for every decision. (See also Bonnie Dillabough’s Infinity on Fire) You can show who a hero becomes after one different choice. You can resurrect dead characters, undo catastrophic events, or run the same scenario with different variables. For serialized fiction, where years of continuity paint writers into corners, it’s the ultimate escape hatch. That’s exactly why people who’ve run out of ideas keep reaching for it, and people who have one rarely need to. For more, see moorcock’s eternal champion.
The execution is where writers destroy themselves, because what if everything is possible isn’t a story.Share on X
It also lets you ask the most compelling question in fiction: what if? What if the villain won? What if the hero never existed? What if one small decision thirty years ago changed everything? Those questions stick with people because everybody’s life turned on choices they barely noticed making. For more, see writing character deaths that matter.
Watch: Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now, Like Stories of Old
Why Do Multiverse Stories Go Wrong?
The multiverse goes wrong when it eliminates consequences. If a character dies but another version of them exists in a parallel universe, death loses its weight. If any event can be undone by jumping to an alternate timeline, stakes evaporate, and the audience stops investing because they’ve learned that nothing is permanent. I blame the studios more than the writers for this. Bringing a beloved character back sells tickets and toys, and the story pays for it every time.
Marvel’s Phase 4 and 5 showed the problem at scale. The multiverse opened exciting possibilities, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” and “Loki” among them, but the sheer volume of parallel realities and timeline variants started eating away at the emotional foundation. When every character has infinite copies, the version you’ve followed for a decade starts to feel replaceable. Marvel’s ambition outran its ability to keep the story coherent, and plenty of fans stopped caring.
The other common failure is complexity without clarity. Multiple timelines, branching realities, and alternate versions of the same character can become impossible to track. If the reader or viewer needs a diagram to follow the plot, the multiverse has stopped serving the story and started replacing it. Complexity isn’t the same as depth.
Which Stories Do the Multiverse Well?
Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series is the gold standard for multiverse fiction done right. Moorcock built a sprawling web of novels where the same archetypal hero (Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, Erekosë) reincarnates across different dimensions to keep the cosmic balance between Law and Chaos. Each incarnation has its own world, its own story, and its own emotional arc, and they’re all tied together through recurring themes, artifacts, and the structure of the multiverse itself. It works because every individual story stands on its own.
For readers who read everything, the multiverse adds depth, but you never need the full system to enjoy one book. Most multiverse writers miss that lesson.
Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” uses parallel universes brilliantly because they serve the characters’ emotional arcs. (See my review of The Golden Compass) The multiverse is how Lyra and Will find out who they are, what they’re willing to sacrifice, and what love and loss look like across realities. The parallel worlds raise the personal stakes.
David Gerrold’s “The Man Who Folded Himself” takes the concept to its logical extreme: a man with a time travel belt who meets infinite versions of himself, in situations that get stranger and more philosophically disturbing as they go. It works because Gerrold goes all the way with the idea and never uses the multiverse as wallpaper. I’ve reread it more than once, and it still gets me.
Star Trek’s mirror universe episodes succeed because they use the alternate reality to reveal something about the main characters. Mirror Spock and mirror Kira show you who the character could be under different circumstances, and that tells you something important about who they are. The writers used the mirror as a character tool, and I’d argue that’s why those episodes still get talked about while flashier alternate-timeline plots have been forgotten.
| Story | How it uses the multiverse | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Moorcock’s Eternal Champion | One archetypal hero reincarnates across dimensions | Every individual story stands on its own |
| Pullman’s His Dark Materials | Parallel worlds drive Lyra and Will’s emotional arcs | Raises personal stakes; the final separation can’t be undone |
| Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself | A man meets infinite versions of himself | Goes all the way with the idea, never wallpaper |
| Star Trek’s mirror universe | Mirror Spock and mirror Kira | Reveals who the main characters are |
| Pratchett and Baxter’s Long Earth | Parallel Earths, no humans, step sideways to the next | Clean premise with complex implications |
The Science Behind It
Not everything about the multiverse is fictional. Theoretical physics offers several frameworks that suggest multiple universes might exist.
The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every quantum event with multiple possible outcomes causes reality to branch, with each outcome occurring in its own parallel universe. Cosmic inflation theory suggests “bubble universes” forming within an ever-expanding substrate, each potentially governed by different physical constants. String theory’s landscape of possible vacuum states implies a vast number of universes with different physical laws.
None of this is confirmed. The big criticism is that if infinite universes exist where anything possible happens somewhere, the hypothesis becomes untestable, and untestable hypotheses sit uncomfortably in science. For fiction writers, though, the physics gives a plausibility that pure fantasy multiverses don’t have. Hard science fiction writers like Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter have built rigorous multiverse narratives on these frameworks, and the science gives those stories a different feel from fantasy multiverses built on magic portals and enchanted artifacts.
My take
Infinite possibility is a trap for a storyteller. A story is made of choices, and a multiverse lets the writer avoid every one of them. If you write one, set hard rules and make each universe cost something. Hard science fiction from Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter shows how much the physics helps. Give the reader a reason to care about this version of the character, or the other versions won’t matter either.
How do you write a multiverse story without wrecking it?
Every version of a character needs to matter on their own terms. If an alternate version exists only to die or to make a point about the “real” version, you’ve wasted a character. Moorcock understood this. Elric, Corum, and Hawkmoon are fully realized protagonists who happen to share a cosmic role.
Consequences have to stick somewhere. If everything can be undone, nothing matters. The multiverse should multiply the ways a decision can go wrong without erasing what decisions cost. Pullman understood this. The ending of “His Dark Materials” is devastating because the multiverse creates a separation that can’t be undone.
Clarity beats complexity. If your reader can’t follow the plot without a timeline diagram, you’ve failed. Each parallel reality should be distinct enough to track and connected clearly enough to the main narrative that the reader understands why it exists. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s “Long Earth” series managed this by keeping the premise clean: parallel Earths, no humans on any of them, step sideways to reach the next one. Simple concept, complex implications.
The best multiverse stories use parallel realities to see familiar characters and situations from angles that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. The worst treat it as an infinite sandbox where nothing has weight. I resent the sandbox version, because it’s a writer using the biggest idea in the genre to dodge the hard work of making one story matter, and most of the multiverse fiction I’ve seen lately takes that route.
If nothing matters because there’s always another universe, your story doesn’t matter either. Use the multiverse to ask a hard question about a choice, and make the answer cost somebody. I’d much rather read one universe where a death sticks than a dozen where everyone gets a do-over, and I think most readers feel the same way even when the box office says otherwise.
Altverse is my multiverse novel. Ari maps condemned buildings for a living until he finds a device with forty-three symbols on its ring, and each one opens somewhere else.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- The Long Earth, Publishers Weekly
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