Double-Vision: Neil Gaiman

A number of works by Neil Gaiman include incomprehensible elements within a comprehensible story. Such inclusion in sf is here called the Zug effect. This effect appears in Gaiman’s work when diachronic events are represented synchronically. In his novel Anansi Boys (2005), Gaiman calls these events moments of ‘double-vision’. These moments consist of the co-presencing of the changed and the unchanged within a single being at one moment in time. In other words, a world is developed in which both the knowable and unknowable appear together. While change is everywhere around us, in germination, growth and decay, the term ‘double-vision’ indicates the potential of seeing more than one side of a transformation simultaneously, thereby presenting a moment of stasis within change. One of the important consequences of Gaiman’s double-vision is that the movement of change then becomes easier to see.