[quarkstomper]

I've just finished reading The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, a wonderful time travel/alternate universe story. One of the important devices in the plot is a portal which allows a person to actually enter a book. A master criminal is blackmailing the government by threatening to alter important works of fiction, but another sinister character has another use for the device:

"Anything that the human imagination can think up, we can reproduce. I look at the portal less of a gateway to a million worlds, but more like a three dimensional photocopier. With it we can make anything we want."

I recall a science fiction story, I forget the author, about a universe-hopping scout who gets big money for discovering alternate universes with useful resources. In this case the resources are pieces of popular culture. Imagine how much a Beatles album would be worth snatched from a universe where they never broke up? Or where Buddy Holly never took that fatal plane trip and lived to make hit after hit? (Yes, that's the premise of the "Holly" world from IW)

That would avoid the problem from Isaac Asimov's novel The Gods Themselves, where "mining" the energy from a proto-universe threatens to destablize the balance between other universes. If only information is taken from another universe, nothing is affected.

Unless it would make a good plot...