POCKET UNIVERSE

   It might be said that the inhabitant of any constricted environment lives in a pocket universe, whether as a child, a prisoner, a victim of dementia, a chained watcher in Plato's cave, a resident of Hell or an inhabitant of the world inside Pantagruel's mouth. It might also be suggested that the dynamic moment of escape from confinement - a leitmotiv of Western literature - always marks the transition from a pocket universe to a fuller and more real world. When Huck, in the final pages of Mark TWAIN's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883 UK), decides "to lightout for the Territory ahead of the rest", the Hannibal from which he escapes - with its rigid social organization and its conservative inwardness of gaze - has many of the psychological characteristics of the pocket universe as found in sf. The classic movement of the sf tale is of course outward - via CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGHS and all the other forms of initiation or unshackling - and in that sense most sf works contain some sort of pocket universe, implied or explicit, which initially binds and blinds the protagonist, and from which it is necessary to escape.The term should perhaps, therefore, be confined to two usages, one broad, the other narrower. It can be used broadly to describe an actual miniature universe pocketed within a larger explanatory frame or device - like the various godling-crafted worlds nesting within one another in Philip Jose FARMER's World of Tiers sequence; or like the set-ups in almost any of Jack L.CHALKER's series (e.g., the Well World sequence and the Four Lords of the Diamond tetralogy) which feature universes constructed by godlike beings as gamelike contrivances and inhabited by victim-players who must solve their universe to escape from it; or like similar 1950s set-ups (see PARANOIA) such as in Frederik POHL's "The Tunnel under the World" (1955)or Philip K. DICK's Time Out of Joint (1958), whose protagonists are victims of artificial worlds shaped to delude and manipulate them; or (again trivially) like any fantasy game which involves role-playing withina VIRTUAL-REALITY world; or in fact like any world (such as that on which John CROWLEY's The Deep (1975) is set, or Terry PRATCHETT's Discworld) whose origins and extent reflect a sense of constraining artifice. But none of these applications contains the one essential element that defines the true pocket-universe tale: Farmer's and Chalker's protagonists may not know the nature of the worlds in which they find themselves, but they do know that they are inhabiting some form of construct. In the pocket-universe tale as more narrowly defined, the world initially perceived seems to be the entire world, and the web of taboos preventing the truth about its partial nature being known is structurally very similar to the parental restrictions which initially hamper the move through puberty into adulthood of the young protagonists of most non-genre juveniles. It could, indeed, be argued that this move through puberty is a particular example of the conceptual breakthrough which arguably structures all genuine sf.The classic GENERATION-STARSHIP tale is one in which the descendants of the original crew members have forgotten the true nature of things and have instituted a repressive, TABOO-governed society which suppresses any attempt to discover the truth; it is the task of the young protagonist to break through the social and epistemological barriers stifling this world while at the same time successfully managing puberty. The pure generation-starship story embodies, therefore, the purest form ofthe concept of the pocket universe. Examples of that pure form, though central to sf, are not numerous - Robert A. HEINLEIN's Universe (1941 ASF; 1951 chap) is the most famous in the list, which includes also Brian W.ALDISS's Non-Stop (1958; vt Starship 1959 US) and Harry HARRISON's Captive Universe (1969); but Alexei PANSHIN's RITE OF PASSAGE (1968), for instance, though explicitly a tale of puberty, does not suggest that there is any epistemological mystery about the nature of the asteroid-sized starship from which its heroine must escape.All post- HOLOCAUST tales in which the descendants of survivors live in underground habitats which they think to be the whole of reality are pocket-universe stories. The best of them is perhaps Daniel F. GALOUYE's Dark Universe (1961), though Margaret ST CLAIR's Sign of the Labrys (1963) and The Shadow People (1969) playfruitfully with the concept, as do Richard COWPER's Kuldesak (1972), Roger ELDRIDGE's The Shadow of the Gloom-World (1977) and many others. In allthese stories, the essential movement is from childhood constriction and taboo-driven ignorance to adult freedom and breakthrough, though the protagonist of Gene WOLFE's Darkside the Long Sun (1993) is, unusually, an adult from the very beginning of his long adventure in truth-seeking; in GENRE SF it is only more recently that ironies have significantly pervadedthis pattern, as in David LAKE's Ring of Truth (1983), where a traditional enclosed world turns out to be interminably extensive, so that there is, in fact, no exit. In the great pocket-universe stories, however, there is always an out, a SENSE OF WONDER, a new world opening before the opened eyes.

   JC

   See also: GODS AND DEMONS.