Headscratchers / InterWorld

• I don't really get how the versions of Joey from different dimensions can be classified as alternate versions of him. Take the female winged Joey, for instance. Her body is different, her name is a bit different, her gender's different... What about her, exactly, makes her the alternate version of Joey? It seems to me that she's just a woman from another dimension who might look a bit like him in some ways. I'm sure you could find los of women with that resemblance in her world, so how, exactly, did they determine that this particular woman is her universe's version of Joey?
  • Because she can Walk between worlds. Only the alternates of Joey can do that.
• Another question on the same subject: can you even say that the other universes have their own version of Joey? Many of them seem to be so different that most likely, Joey was never born. To create Joey, his parents needed to have sex. And since it matters which sperm conceives the egg, they needed to have sex at the exact right time. Obviously, this applies to their parents (AKA Joey's grandparents) as well. Considering how incrediby unlikely that is, I'd say many of the universes in the book just never would have had a Joey to begin with. It seems to me that the only thing the Joeys from parallell universes have in common is the ability to travel between dimensions and a certain visual resemblance. The idea that they're "alternate Joeys" doesn't hold up.
  • It's a bit more than that. Every single one has a name beginning with J, all the ones that have surnames have one that begins with H, they all look alike and think along the same lines (notice not one Joey ever signed up with either HEX or the Binary willingly) and not one person with the ability to travel between dimensions under their own power doesn't fit this pattern. It seems that a version of Joey is just something a lot of universes turn up, a pattern that naturally occurs for some reason. So they are all alternate versions of the same thing, they just might have taken different routes to get there.