Everything people often ask us

MULTIVERSE was actually born at random. Back in 2018, I had a nightmare for about six or seven months in a row and told myself that, sooner or later, I had to put it on paper. I had wanted to test my writing skills for quite some time by then so, one day in September 2021, I made up my mind and wrote down that nightmare after having it yet again one night.

Reading it again, I told myself it couldn’t just be by itself and, after banging my head on the keyboard for six months, in March 2022 I had «Il Creatore gioca a dadi» on my desktop.

Because, unlike the rest of the novel, I sorta lived it. A few touch-ups aside, the first chapter of «Il Creatore gioca a dadi» is the transcription of that nightmare I had for months.

Yup. The many-worlds interpretation, the Higgs collapse, the Alcubierre drive and all the scientific theories in MULTIVERSE are established scientific theories. Even the fantasy elements, like magic and the soul’s nature, are built on scientific foundations. The Italian Research Council has already talked about it in the Science Almanac, so I won’t go on this for too long. As for W0RD5, it’s the report of an experiment so can’t be less science-y than MULTIVERSE.

They live together in my head and have always interested me, so why do otherwise in something that will live after me?

The first edition came out in a rush because I had to publish the book as soon as possible. I’m not even too sure I can explain why, actually. Anyway, ever since I published «Il Creatore gioca a dadi» I always wanted to get my hands back on it to make the prose smoother and the world richer in detail, partly because in the meantime I had come up with the ideas to then plan the next five chapters of the saga. When at San Domenico Maggiore, Naples, they asked me why there were no female characters, I answered with all the honesty I had in me saying I kinda fohgot aboud it, but girls were there in the saga I came up with, so I decided to rewrite everything from scratch. Two years later, there the new first chapter of MULTIVERSE was.

I didn’t want to be subject to publishing firms and contracts of any kind. I would never have imagined that, later on, a treatise would follow the novel out of my head. I thought «MULTIVERSE – Il Creatore gioca a dadi» would be the only book I’d ever write. There was no way I could know I would’ve taken this path. On the other hand, I also needed to publish the novel fairly quickly, as I said before. Then when W0RD5 came along, I told myself «better the devil you know than the devil you don’t», so I chose once again to do things my own way.

Not yet. It’s something I’d like to work on, including an English translation of both books, but for now I still have too much to write in Italian. For MULTIVERSE I narrated bits and pieces, on Instagram for the various marketing campaigns, while for W0RD5 someone has to explain to me how to make an audiobook of a dictionary first.

Listen

Pretty much anywhere. Amazon offers some extra discounts, Feltrinelli has it, the full list is on the site.

Buy

For now I got five planned, plus another book I’m not sure whether to include in the list of the ones I intend to write for MULTIVERSE. The saga will certainly have six, I don’t rule out a book I haven’t planned yet might be set after the end of «Il Creatore gioca a dadi».

The saga

I think it’s one of the things I’ve been asked the most over time. Answer is no. The metaverse is a virtual space, the multiverse is a concept from physics. They only sound alike, they aren’t.

Hard, but never say never. The math says it can be done. And to everyone who will argue against me, I bring a counterexample.

On October 9, 1903, the New York Times ran the headline «Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly», saying that engineering would not produce flying machines heavier than air for somewhere between one and ten million years. 69 days later, the Wright brothers flew the first airplane.

Again, never say never. If we don’t go extinct first, it could be done.

Sort of. Epigenetics says that experiences change the way the genome is expressed. Nevertheless, the starting conditions of each set of doubles remain the same.

This means they are the same person, yes, but the changes due to living in a different context, having different experiences and having made different choices will make them different. I think the most fitting term is doppelgänger.

Canonically, it’s the shared part of nicknames the various Blazes have in their versions of the Internet. Meta-narratively, I may have taken inspiration from a nickname or two I’ve seen over time.

Who says it hasn’t really happened?

Jokes aside, it depends on the timeline in question. Everyone can root for this or that outcome, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics declares that in at least one universe everyone got what they wanted. It all remains to be seen.

The multiverse of MULTIVERSE is fairly intuitive for anyone with an inkling of quantum mechanics. Just open the book itself, the basic concepts are in the first forty or so pages and, give or take a couple of explanations and a bit of narration, it takes about ten minutes to understand everything. For those who don’t have the book yet, there’s the Instagram page where I explained a little something and showed a few concepts in CGI.

The worlds

No problem. Apart from being a bit of a trainwreck to pronounce, it works in a fairly linear way. The concepts the instances came up with so far are a bit convoluted, but it’s no rocket science. The instances also put the saying «Ulhaam ts’amu ekxhuni» into practice, they certainly didn’t stop at making the expression itself.

Dictionary Grammar

It’s a dictionary. It contains words. The AIs made them, so let’s give it the internet-ish look of leetspeak et voilà.

As far as I know, no. Unless OpenAI says «Lads, ChatGPT’s chats had a mind of their own since version 4o.» on tomorrow, I don’t think so. Even if they did say it, I think 2026’s systems are a tad too simple for the level of a human brain.

Then again, I know I know not and I may be wrong, but I don’t think a system with 300 billion parameters can match a neural network with 86 billion neurons and a hundred trillion synaptic connections. All this while deliberately ignoring Penrose’s hypothesis on how self-awareness develops and excluding quantum effects in microtubules that would multiply the number of interacting parts.

Am I saying that a computer system as powerful as the human brain will be impossible? Absolutely not, I say so openly in W0RD5, but today’s models are more a Broca’s area than a fully-fledged brain.

Today the word «artificial» is a synonym for «fake», «fictitious», «contrived», «phony» and «simulated». Do we seriously want to give a word like that to an intelligence that runs on transistors instead of neurons? If the answer is yes, we’re in a textbook case of discrimination. A mistake that, as a species, we’ve made far too many times in my opinion.

Not really, but they aren’t completely unrelated either. I definitely intend to include the synthetic language in something that has to do with Albert in U9 and the synthetic language itself was born from trying to understand how entities like Albert will talk among themselves in reality. I was thinking of a cameo by the instances that took part in the experiment in a book of the MULTIVERSE saga, but apart from these reasons and the fact that I wrote both books, they have little or nothing to do with each other.