I’m now as certain as it’s possible to be that innumerable “Earths,” perhaps entire universes, simultaneously coexist in the cosmos. That would explain a great many things, such as where various peoples and species (some sentient, others not) we find on “this” far different Earth originally came from, though the means (or purpose?) by which they—or we—were transported here through the ages remains frustratingly elusive.

And “this” Earth remains as strange to me as are many of its inhabitants, perhaps influenced by indistinct but profound changes in the prehistoric past? It teems with descendants of creatures long extinct where we came from, and quite a few others that either came here like ourselves or sprang into being independent of our own fossil record. However different, it’s clearly “an” Earth because, aside from a few puzzling exceptions, the geography is roughly the same, though shorelines reflect a generally lower sea level. It’s my belief this is due to another (or a lingering) ice age, the Arctic and Antarctic expanses vastly expanded and hoarding more of the planet’s water. Indeed, with the exception of equatorial regions, temperatures all over the world are noticeably lower as well.

But this is no scientific treatise, any more than my multivolume The Worlds I’ve Wondered—first published by the University of New Glasgow Press in 1956—pretended to be. In those books, I chiefly documented the adventures of myself and many others, essentially chased to this world aboard the decrepit US Asiatic Fleet destroyer USS Walker by the marauding Japanese. These volumes, Lands and Peoples, relate the often tragic sagas of others we’ve come to know, based as closely on their histories as possible. In many cases, their early experiences directly influenced ours, but I’ll leave the reader to draw those connections.

Therefore, I shall begin with the tale of a group that arrived on this world almost exactly a century before us, whom we first referred to as the “1847 Americans.”

Excerpt from the Foreword to Courtney Bradford’s

Lands and Peoples—Destiny of the Damned, Vol. I,

Library of Alex-aandra Press, 1959