Perhaps we still haven't been able to shake the comforting notion that we do, after all, live in the best of all possible worlds. How seductive to be seduced by the thought that everything happens for a reason, that there are organizing forces in world affairs that put into action comprehensive action plans that are always oriented towards an end--not even a benign end, necessarily. We have grown out of that puerile expectation, we merely hope and dream that events are not determined by erratic chance and are instead the product of concerted agendas. I would claim that, compared to a world in which large-scale decisions are wrenched out of frantic conversations and spontaneous impulses (our world, this world, so to speak), a world that is at the mercy of a syndicate of mysterious cigarette-smoking men is actually the product of a more idealistic mind. Such a world is more pure, more manageable.
In any case, though the process of executing this world-plan be unpleasant, even unbearable to behold, we would be able to withstand such hardship knowing that it is angled towards the ultimate fruition of something or another. We would be able to suffer centuries upon generations of abuse, held fast by such a doctrine.

In this light, it seems to me that is it all the more important to engage with narratives which create contemporaneous alternate worlds. Alternative dimensions and parallel universes are no new gimmick: but to harness these to the realm of recent socio-political issues rather than flights of sci-fi fancy is a distinct move, differentiable even from depictions of dystopic worlds insofar as they are firmly anchored in a time that coincides crisply with our own. As such, they give some kind of plausible reference point for comparison: we can determine, face to face with such alternate worlds, whether our world really is the best of all possible worlds. In the case of Paul Auster's novel Man In the Dark, we are presented with a desolate New York, ravaged by civil war: granted, the first reaction to such a circumstance must be one of horror and sadness. How terrible for the inhabitants of such a world, that they are stuck in the middle of a civil war with no TV and high inflation!
But then again, remember that in this world 9/11 never happened, and neither did the Iraq war. And so we come to realize that we cannot patronizingly pity the citizens of that other America. Their plight is merely different from ours, and it so happens that the decisions of our world come to take on a counterfactual dimension--"what if?" is no longer just a futile question unworthy of being addressed, it is a question that highlights the idea that our history can be constructed just as Auster constructs his fictional worlds.