The Garden of Forking Paths
1941
Short fiction
"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, first published in 1941 and later collected in Ficciones (1944). On its surface it is a spy thriller set during World War I: a Chinese agent embedded in England must find a way to transmit a crucial message to his German handlers before he is captured. Beneath this, the story unfolds a vision of time as a garden of forking paths — an infinite branching of simultaneous, parallel realities — which Borges embodied both as a philosophical concept and as the structural logic of the narrative itself. The story is widely cited as an early fictional anticipation of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and has been referenced in serious physics literature, including by Bryce DeWitt in his 1970 article popularising Hugh Everett's work.