Watchmen
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Alternate Reality?
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That is a very interesting point you have and I am definantly going to have to read Watchmen again to look into that, good find.
Interesting thought, but I did not get the implication that Dr. M was going to create a particular type of human life or that it would be in an alternate reality. More like elsewhere in that universe.Though I wouldn't put it beyond Jon to create and guide a world that didn't develop masked adventurers or superheroes to see if they didn't make different choices.
seeing that it's a given that a god would create beings in his own image, I present the hypothesis that Doctor Manhatan created the world of Avatar ;-)
Moore gives us enough room to entertain that possibility, I suppose, what with the many worlds view of quantum mechanics and all.However, I always took that statement to mean that Dr Manhattan was just going off to some far corner of the universe to pursue his god like ambitions. After all the universe is a pretty huge place.
The other suggestion, from examining the panels, is that he went INTO the orrery.
This may be a bit off-topic, but your hypothesis reminded me of a Philip K Dick novel, The Man in the High Castle, which was an alternate history.Now I'm going from memory, but it was something like the Axis powers had won WWII and the USA was under German and Japanese rule. The Japanese were occupying the Western part of the country and the Germans occupied the Eastern half.
Anyway, in this alternate history, there was a guy who had written a book that was an alternate history where the Allies had won WWII, so it could have been our universe that he had written about.
That PKD and his crazy alternate reality ideas!
Nah, can't think of it that way. He's not that Marvel-like.
Peter wrote: "This may be a bit off-topic, but your hypothesis reminded me of a Philip K Dick novel, The Man in the High Castle, which was an alternate history.Now I'm going from memory, but it was something li..."
My memory says that the Allies-Win alternate history in the The Man In The High Castle was different again to what happenned in our world... something about US and American troops reinforcing the Russians at Stalingrad and so on.
It was a world in which Britain and America acted like Germany and Japan did in "reality". Therefore, the Oracle when asked the reason for it, replies "Inner Truth".
Back from PKD and to the first question .... 'This makes me wonder if it's implied that Dr. M went off and created a the "alternate" reality in which Alan Moore and we live. One where superheros were just in comic books, and the US lost Viet Nam.' Like others, I've always taken this simply to reveal Jon to be (a) God intent on creating his own Genesis in a remote corner of the universe. This short of suggests that he could only be the creator of our 'alternate' to their reality if everyone understood that the age of the world could be numbered in decades (or not more than 6,000 years old anyway).
I just don't think Jon would be that kind of being and, given the long exchange with Laurie on Mars, what he loves about human life is the infinitesimally tiny odds that we manage to exist at all - in other words, if his love of life is the way that it seems to organise chaos into meaning then it seems unlikely that he would use his powers to create a world that was almost exactly the same as the one he had left (i.e. that had had an Alexander the Great, a Roman Empire, a War of Independence etc.)
I took that conversation thus: the world M knows is doomed (that's the ending, after all). All of Veidt's meddling did nothing to avert the coming nuclear war. M knows it's inevitable, and doesn't want to stick around to see it unfold. He likes humans well enough (or perhaps he is lonely enough) to create a world of his own.Not incompatible with ba's idea. But I don't see much support for ba's idea, either.
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Just a thought...