Guy Dent's Emperor of the If and the Multiverse Before the Multiverse
In 2014, the animated series Rick and Morty aired an episode called "Rick Potion #9." In it, Rick concocts a love potion that goes catastrophically wrong, mutating humanity with a spreading virus. Rather than fix the damage, Rick locates an alternate universe where a version of himself already solved the problem and died in the process. He moves in. His grandson Morty helps bury his own alternate-universe corpse in the backyard and quietly resumes his life in a world identical to the one he lost, except that the version of himself who lived there is now dead.
If you described the premise of Rick and Morty to someone without naming the show, it might sound like this: a brilliant, reckless scientist operates out of a laboratory behind his house, dragging his reluctant companion into wild experiments and journeys across other worlds and alternate realities, where they frequently encounter other versions of themselves. The companion is cautious, anxious, and decent. The scientist is completely reckless, driven by ego and indifferent to whatever damage he leaves behind.
Guy Dent wrote that book in 1926. He called it Emperor of the If.
It has been out of print for a century. Almost no one has read it. And it contains one of the most genuinely strange multiverse concepts in the history of speculative fiction, one that in some respects remains more interesting, and considerably weirder, than anything the genre has produced since.
The Machine in the Puff-Ball
The scientist is Chilton-Greyne. His laboratory is a massive concrete structure built in the shape of a puff-ball mushroom, walls feet thick, door of solid steel, situated some eighty yards behind his house in a strip of wind-nipped fir trees. Inside, housed in a vulcanite dish on a low table, is a preserved human brain. Not a robot, not a computer, but a biological receiver for what Greyne calls the universal Force of Thought.
The brain once belonged to a small greengrocer in the Tottenham Court Road who died worrying over debts. Greyne bought it from the hospital and spent months improving it, inoculating certain lobes with cultures to grow new tissue, expanding its sensitivity. It now weighs fifteen ounces more than normal, pulsing with a slow, rhythmic membrane-beat that Blatherwick, Greyne's companion and reluctant assistant, finds almost hypnotic. Greyne describes it as "the almost ideal brain." It will never wear out. It is, he insists, calm with a calmness not of this world.
His theory is that the universe is saturated with creative Force the way the air is saturated with wireless waves, and that the ordinary human brain is too weak to tune into it. The preserved brain, connected to an amplification apparatus by cables Greyne calls its "spinal cord," is sensitive enough to do what no living brain can: receive, amplify, and project the thought-waves of history's alternatives into physical reality. He calls the concept Materialized Thought.
I want to pause here and let that sink in. The man bought a dead greengrocer's brain, improved it in a shed, and is now using it to summon alternate timelines. We are barely past chapter one.
His companion Blatherwick is a small, fussy man burdened with what the novel calls "phenomenal eyebrows." He deploys them like a drawbridge, pulling them down whenever he wants to signal displeasure, which is often. He communicates largely from behind them. He would very much rather be at lunch. He has, in fact, a luncheon engagement at the Carlton (roast chicken and mushrooms) and he thinks about it with distinct pleasure at regular intervals throughout the novel.
For thirty-one years, Blatherwick has been trying to get Greyne to stop communicating by vague sweeping gesture instead of words. Greyne makes "a wide movement which might have meant anything, or nothing," apologizes, says it's a habit, and immediately does it again. Rick Sanchez, for all his genius, communicates through burps and half-sentences and waves of the hand, and everyone around him has spent years learning to interpret. Blatherwick has been doing that same job for three decades, and he has not gotten used to it.
The If
Greyne's plan is to materialize a specific "If": the world as it would exist today had the Ice Age never occurred. The brain device does not travel through time. It does something stranger: it superimposes an alternative reality directly over the existing present. The "Ifs" of history, the potential realities that never happened, can be summoned and made to coexist with the world as it is.
What follows has to be one of the more extraordinary set pieces in British scientific romance. The prehistoric world doesn't arrive all at once. It seeps in. Traffic grinds to a standstill as drivers dissolve mid-route. A Maltese organ-grinder, apparently immune to existential crisis, strikes up a tune; a duck-faced woman in the street begins dancing a mincing old-fashioned step; a pompous gentleman in a silk hat joins in, arms akimbo. Then a workman crawls out from between two motionless bus wheels, beating at himself with crimson hands, dancing in the broken glass until he simply crumples, face-down on the road, and then collapses inward until there is nothing left at all but a shimmering shadow rising from the wooden blocks of the street like a swarm of huge glittering flies, circling once and drifting north-east over the rooftops.
Leicester Square is being swallowed by tropical jungle. At the Embankment, two feet of muddy water has already advanced twenty yards from the normal bank, and from the old riverbed beneath, thousands of prehistoric calamite plants are shooting upward at inches per second, throwing out rings of spikes as they rise, reaching the height of a tall man while Blatherwick watches, and still growing. A lone motor bus pushes slowly through the flood, foam creaming around its wheels.
Then, over Piccadilly Circus, pterodactyls.
Six of them, wingspans twenty feet, reptilian heads, jaws clashing, diving out of the direction of the Circus onto a group of demonstrators who are still, inexplicably, carrying their banners toward Buckingham Palace. Greyne drives straight at the pterodactyls to scatter them. A chunk from the side of their car is bit off in the process. Afterward, Greyne notes that his young nephew who he is always telling adventure stories to would love this.
Meanwhile, civilization keeps functioning, sort of. The buses don't stop immediately. Greyne uses the image of a flywheel with the power cut: it keeps turning, slowing imperceptibly at first, and only later do you understand it was already stopping. He calls it "The Inertia of Custom," the sheer force of habit keeping the world lurching forward even as it transforms around its inhabitants. But the wheel is slowing and eventually does stop.
People around them physically collapse and disintegrate. Their minds cannot sustain the abrupt shift in reality. Consciousness abandons the body when a person accepts the thought that they now exist in a world that never knew they existed. Only the obstinate survive: the strong-willed, the stubborn, the people of action who simply refuse to consider the possibility that their world has ended.
The representative survivor Dent gives us is a road-mender in Dover Street, calmly regarding a hole in the pavement from which white prehistoric threads are waving like reaching fingers. Asked what he makes of it, he removes his pipe and says it doesn't hurt him in the slightest. It's untidy-like, he grants. He wants to know if pay will go on as usual. He's heading to Parsons Green to check on the missus, and if the tube isn't running, he'll walk.
This is a question Philip K. Dick would spend an entire career obsessing over, that is what happens to a mind that perceives the fragility of its own reality too clearly? In the post-credits scene of "Rick Potion #9," Morty's family are seen perfectly content in a Cronenberg-infested world (Cronenberg being what fans call the grotesquely mutated monsters Rick accidentally created, named in the credits after the director), even admitting they're actually happier with both Rick and Morty gone. The obstinate inherit the earth. Those who cannot accept the new reality dissolve.
The Many Greynes
The novel's first great confrontation occurs on the Sussex Downs, where Greyne and Blatherwick encounter a tribe of enormous, camouflage-skinned humans, hairy and fearful, reduced by millions of years without civilization to something barely above animal consciousness. Under the pressure of the encounter, Greyne finds himself speaking in a broad Sussex dialect, the suppressed accent of his family's roots. Astonishingly, the tribe answers in kind.
Fans of Rick and Morty will recognize the premise. The show returns repeatedly to Rick encountering other versions of himself, and the confrontations are rarely comfortable for anyone's ego.
Here it slowly becomes clear that the Chilton-Greyne lineage held land in the downs for centuries. These are alternate Greynes, what their bloodline would have produced across millions of years without security, without leisure, without any of the necessary environmental conditions that make scientific achievement possible.
Their spokesman delivers a scathing indictment. His people are as they are because an altruist who thought himself a god wished to show humanity how magnificent they might have become, and instead produced this. Fear was their inheritance. Generation after generation robbed of any chance, until the will itself was lost.
Greyne asks about art.
"If by art you mean beauty, I say that our only salvation lay in beauty. Now and then... at moments snatched during the hours of darkness... Yes, beauty is our only form of worship."
Greyne cries out: "Then I have won! It has been worth while!"
He immediately reframes their entire history of suffering as vindication of his experiment. Which is to say: he finds out that millions of his own descendants lived in terror and degradation across geological time, and his takeaway is that he was right. He immediately reframes their entire history of suffering as vindication of his experiment. Which is to say: he finds out that millions of his own descendants lived in terror and degradation across geological time, and his takeaway is that he was right. Wubba lubba dub-dub. Rick Sanchez, after blowing up a planet, has said essentially the same thing.
The Wallipergurnians
Having surveyed the past, the brain machine is aimed toward the future. And this is where, if you'll forgive me, the book starts giving the show a genuine run for its money.
In the future, two warring factions of self-reproducing sentient machines, the Rounds and the Squares, are locked in endless, pointless conflict. Humanity has devolved into the Wallipergurnians: hairy, neckless, nearly sexless dwarfs with enormous paddle-like hands, bred across eons into near-mindlessness, kept alive to grease the hinges of their mechanical masters' pincers. The machines scoop them up whenever maintenance is required. The Wallipergurnians don't much mind. They have no memory of anything better.
It’s reminiscent of the Rick and Morty episode "The Ricks Must Be Crazy," in which Rick reveals that his car battery is powered by an entire miniature universe whose inhabitants have been engineered, entirely without their knowledge, to generate power for his engine. Morty calls it "slavery with extra steps."
But Dent goes further. Among the Wallipergurnians is one figure who stands apart, referred to throughout only as the Dwarf. He is a stonemason by trade, appointed Librarian by the machines. He notes, with some bitterness, that this is typical: "Never give a fellow the work he can do — naturally. 'Twouldn't do."
His father was the last sexually distinct male before the population drifted into near-androgyny across generations. Before he died, the father passed on what fragments he could, bits of ancient language, scraps of folklore, a system of cultural cataloguing the Dwarf can recite fluently and understand not at all. He has also inherited a set of expletives drawn from old newspaper headlines ("rosy sunset," "fair-faced," "stuttering beauties") deployed as curses with great indignation and zero comprehension of what they once meant. The effect is simultaneously hilarious and desolate.
He is the only one who remembers enough to suffer. In a scene of genuine ferocity, he beats his fists on the ground and screams:
"Blink and blister the old fool, I've always hated him! Last of the men, was he? I wish I'd never been born — nor my old devil of a father — nor my grandfather... Why did he make me different to the rest? They don't mind all this — don't know there was ever anything better. But the old swine told me about ease and comfort, and never took any steps to preserve them for me. Why? Why? Why?"
He is a figure Philip Dick would have recognized immediately, the one man conscious enough to perceive his own degradation and too far gone to do anything about it. In "The Ricks Must Be Crazy," a scientist named Kyle who discovers his entire civilization exists only to generate power for a layer of reality above his own cannot bear the knowledge, and kills himself. The Dwarf cannot even do that. At the moment of crisis, as the machines close in, he rallies the fleeing mob with the only battle-cry his father left him: "Play up! Play the game!" Nobody knows what it means. It works anyway, briefly.
The Ending
Greyne ultimately vanishes into his own machine. He sends Blatherwick a telephone message and then bars the laboratory door against him. When Blatherwick arrives, he finds the lever already moved and the room empty of any sign of life, save for the pulsating membrane of the organism on the table.
The mechanism was still running, manifesting whatever world Greyne's own mind had set in motion.
Blatherwick has not seen his friend since.
What the novel ends with is Blatherwick himself, sitting by his fireside, or returning half-stealthily to the wooden chair before the table, his hand resting on the tiny lever of ivory, hesitating, going away, returning. He is no longer quite sure whether the London around him is the real one or an If. The houses and the streets stay steady about him, he suspects, only because he is accustomed to seeing them there. He never pulls the lever.
The major ingredient of Blatherwick's expectancy, Dent tells us in the novel's final line, is hope.
Rick Sanchez, for all his nihilism, always comes home. Greyne does not.
A Note on the Book
Emperor of the If was published by William Heinemann, London, in 1926. It is cited in Clute and Nicholls's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as one of the first novels to treat history as a developing series of alternatives, and in Stableford's Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 as one of the most striking scientific romances of the decade. First editions are exceptionally scarce.
What you are holding, if you are fortunate enough to be holding one, is a book that anticipated the central obsession of twentieth-century science fiction by the length of a generation, and then was quietly forgotten.
The greengrocer's brain is still on the table. The lever is still within reach.
