What if our own reality were just one of many? Sometimes this involves an escape into one of these alternate realities, and just as often an incursion into our own. What if? That’s the core question of any speculative fiction, but the idea of parallel worlds distills it down even further: what if there were another you, or another world running alongside our own. In science fiction, you may not be immortal, but your back-up copy might be. In Ferrett Steinmetz' The Uploaded, digital consciousness subs in for the afterlife, with grand complications. Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space books offer a dual path, featuring both sentient copies of minds as well as replicas that function by predicting the choices that you might make. If my mind is copied and uploaded to a computer (or an android, or another body, etc.), am I still me? Even if the copy is flawless? And am I responsible for the thoughts and actions of a replica? Science fiction authors have taken on the question from all sides: in Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, everyone is given an implanted gadget that records everything they experience and recall as a handy back-up that can be loaded into a fresh "sleeve" should anything happen to the original (the same idea is employed to more humorous ends in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). We like this one because it presents a host of philosophical quandaries, centered around the question of what makes us who we are. Robert Heinlein wrote one of the most famous early works using the trope in Orphans of the Sky, while Elizabeth Bear (the Jacob's Ladder trilogy) and Kim Stanley Robinson ( Aurora, which posits we're probably better off staying at home) have produced notable recent examples. Crews of fictional generation ships face all the usual dangers inherent in space travel, with the additional complication that anyone who actually had a choice about being there will be dead before the ship actually gets anywhere. Scientists and writers have long suggested that the only true means of getting people from one star to another in the vastness of space is by packing a bunch of families onto a very large ship and sending them all off on a journey that might take centuries. A good percentage of outer-space science fiction prefers to avoid coping with the vast distances between stars by sending ships down wormholes (see below) or through hyperspeed (see further below, FTL). Books can include cryosleep as a background element (Mur Lafferty’s recent award-nominee Six Wakes follows a crew of clones ferrying slumbering cargo across the stars) or foreground it into the plot (Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time shows us the evolution of an entire alien species, but keeps its human characters alive for the duration, only popping them out of hibernation once a generation), so the trope is often about much more than a clever way to skip past the boring parts.Īgain, the thing about space is… there’s a lot of it, and it takes a really, really long time to get anywhere. Khan preserved himself for centuries before wreaking his wrath on Captain Kirk, and the several members of the ill-fated crew of the Odyssey in the film and novel versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey napped their ways to Jupiter. Think Rip Van Winkle, or, if you're a bit less classy, Encino Man. Cryosleep (aka suspended animation) involves a character or characters that are placed in something like an induced coma for the duration of a long voyage, or perhaps in order to survive over long spans of time. So dull, in fact, that knocking people out for long journeys between stars has become a trope. Quickly becoming Heaven-defying, Yang Kai eventually reaches the known peak of Martial Arts.There’s cool stuff in space, sure, but 99.9% of it is pretty empty. This would start him on the path to becoming a true Divine Spirit. Later, he obtained an Ancestral Dragon Source during a cave trip. This fixed his genetic defect and allowed him to finally practice Martial Arts, where he subsequently excelled. One day, he fortuitously obtained a Black Book, which turned out to contain the legacy of the Great Demon God. Yang Kai was a Trial Disciple in High Heaven Pavilion and the ninth Young Master of the Yang Family, one of the Eight Great Families of the Great Han Dynasty. He is notable for his ruthlessness toward his enemies in stark contrast to his loving, caring and generous affection for his allies, family, and friends. Neither arrogant nor servile, Yang Kai has a calm, shrewd, and confident personality. After he started cultivating, his temperament and appearance became more calm and composed. He looked frail and weak during his teenage years at High Heaven Pavilion.
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