Science Fiction and Fact
1923
Men Like Gods
Roman authors were the first to write alternate
histories—tales of what the world might have been had
historical battles ended differently. But stories about alternate
worlds that exist simultaneously with our own came much later. H.G.
Wells (pictured here) becomes the first to write a science fiction
novel that uses a concept similar to Everett's theory of parallel
worlds. In Men Like Gods, several English motorists
inadvertently drive through an invisible barrier and cross into a
parallel world. This alternate world's inhabitants, whom the
travelers call "Utopians," explain that their universe split from
ours 3,000 years before, and that their world and ours are only two
of a vast number of parallel worlds.