Township of Normal, Estados Unidos
Con su rica interacción de realidades alternas (por ejemplo, en los famosos segmentos “apócrifos”) y de múltiples líneas de tiempo, Don Quijote sirve como precursor muy apto para gran parte de la ciencia ficción contemporánea. Mediante una comparación de Don Quijote con la película Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (en la que participan varios “hombre-arañas” introducidos de otras dimensiones), este artículo examina las maneras en que Into the Spider-Verse no sólo manifiesta las teorías cuánticas de Hugh Everett III sobre los “muchos mundos” del llamado “multiverso,” sino que también pone en relieve a varios elementos análogos que Borges había percibido en la obra cervantina para luego explorar en textos como “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.” De esta manera, la película sugiere la posible existencia de un “Quijote-verso” cervantino en el que personajes como Sancho, Marcela, Ricote e incluso Dulcinea puedan existir como “otros” Don Quijotes en sus propias realidades alternas
[...]with the publication of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda's unauthorized sequel to Don Quixote (which Cervantes brilliantly incorporates into his own authorized part two), Avellaneda's "other Don Quixote" is roughly posited as an invader from an alternate reality that exists just beyond the frame created by Cervantes's own narration.1 And this is in addition to all the alternate realities that are already created by the supposedly "apocryphal" segments of the text that play such an important role, especially in part two. [...]as close readers of Don Quixote know all too well, time in Cervantes's La Mancha is anything but simple: as I have argued elsewhere, there are by my count at least sixteen different overlapping and intersecting timelines built into the novel ("Screening Quixote" 173).3 It is this complex interplay of alternate realities and alternative temporalities in Don Quixote that makes the text such an apt precursor to so much of contemporary science fiction, from H. G. Well's The Time Machine to Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future trilogy. [...]the 2009 cinematic reboot of the original Star Trek cast of characters specifically posits itself precisely as an alternate reality that follows what has come to be called the "Kelvin timeline" (so called due to the Romulan attack on the USS Kelvin at the beginning of the reboot, which causes the chain of events to veer dramatically away from those of the original timeline articulated by both the 1960s television series and its concomitant set of 1979-1991 films).5 The phenomenon that Francis Cromphout has called science fiction's tendency toward "pluridimensionality" emerges from Hugh Everett Ill's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics (162)-specifically, the apparent paradox of the wave-particle duality, whereby, as Brian Greene explains, at the quantum level, "objects manifest both wave-like and particle-like properties" (424).6 Contending with what has come to be called the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of this paradox, made famous by Erwin Schrödingers thought experiment involving the cat in the box that is simultaneously both alive and dead until the box is opened ("The indeterminacy of the system 'collapses' onto a single value the moment the act of measurement takes place" [Wittenberg 109]), Everett argued that it is not the act of observation through which the cat-in-the-box paradox is singularly resolved, but rather, that the indeterminacy itself is actually resolved both ways, and that it is the unique observer who witnesses only one of the resolutions, while a hypothetically alternate observer witnesses the alternate resolution.7 As David Baulch succinctly notes: [...]Kingpin and his accomplice Olivia Octavius, aka Doc Ock (voiced by Kathryn Hahn), have built a massive particle collider inside the abandoned subway station in an attempt to access the "multiverse" in order to bring back Kingpin's wife and son, who were killed in a car accident well before the start of the Into the Spider-Verse film