We love fantasizing about alternate universes in film and fiction, but the truth is we already live in different realities. Eight billion of them, to be exact.
This year, I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the world’s largest, for the first time. I attended both as an author and someone who promotes books.
I was in town for another meeting, and that got pushed back, so it was a spontaneous visit, and I was not well-prepared. That colored my impressions. Once there, I learned that the fair was mainly about making deals, selling rights, and negotiating licensing agreements. That, too, shaped my impressions. Finally, a fair being a fair, everything cost extra, most people were fully booked with appointments, and those who weren’t busy weren’t particularly interested in working either. In the end, I concluded: As a marketer, but especially as an author, book fairs are probably a waste of time.
But while I was zigzagging through thousands of people, noticing how few of them talked about actual books and their contents, and how no one seemed to wander about, take it all in, and be in a mode of discovery, someone else was walking across that same floor, having the time of their lives.
Perhaps she was a book seller who had just closed her first significant deal. Maybe it was a journalist excited to interview publishers about their latest hits. Or it could have been a published author learning his book rights had sold for audiobook production. Where I saw enough material to write an article about the decline of publishing culture, someone else had an experience that made them believe the very opposite is true.
It’s a good practice to try and separate our impressions from reality, but to a large extent, our impressions create our reality, and often, what we perceive is worth sharing regardless. After all, though none of our individual impressions are exactly the same, many of them do overlap.
Sci-fi is cool, and I enjoy the latest Marvel movie as much as the next person—but if you really want to dive into an alternate reality, the best thing you can do is to talk to another human being. Pull back the curtain in front of your experiences, and let them do the same. Chances are, you’ll find worlds so distinct, not even the best novel could do them justice—and you don’t need to attend a book fair to explore them.
