Biggie Smalls did not, sadly, survive his 1997 shooting to go on to join forces with Yoko Ono. And there is no earthly evidence of a packed road house owned by Amelia Earhart in some mythical, musical Purgatory, where Buddy Holly and Otis Redding compete for the love of Aaliyah.

Consider, however, the revolutionary works of genius that Biggie, Buddy, Otis and Aaliyah contributed to the world in their tragically brief time on this earth, and the decades of continued creativity we were robbed of. Maryland author and journalist Mark Swartz weaves a compelling alternative universe in which that genius lived on, on this plane or some other, in “The Music Never Died: Tales From the Flipside.”

“Somebody like Amy Winehouse or Kurt Cobain or Biggie, who were just bursting with talent, were reinventing themselves on the go,” said Swartz, a Takoma Park resident who appears at Baltimore’s Snug Books on March 28. “If they had been born at another time, another era, would things have been different? They had reinvented their music already. Would they have done that again?”

“The Music Didn’t Die” reminds me of a lyrical version of “What If?,” the Marvel animated series that imagines alternative timelines for heroes like Black Panther, Captain Carter and Thor. Both concepts are, in their way, about world building, except that with “The Music Never Died,” the heroes have more mortal powers.

Swartz’s pairings are novel — Britney Spears and Jim Morrison or Jeff Buckley and Metallica bassist Cliff Burton. But there is a familiar theme here, in that not all, but most, of the legends in question have not only left us, but at a young age, at the height of their powers.

“Yoko and Biggie were both walking around New York City at the same time, and you don’t really imagine that they would have been at a party together,” he said, but the idea that Ono could have visited the ailing rapper is intriguing. Illustrator Jeb Loy Nichols creates beautiful drawings of each pair in a way that makes them look like they belong together in the frame.

The book’s title, of course, is a reference to Don McLean’s “The Day The Music Died,” a reference to the wintry 1959 plane crash that killed Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson.

As a writer, Swartz said that the question of where these musicians would have wound up was a tantalizing one, ripe for some creative exploration. The creation of the concept had several stages, but the mashup idea was inspired reading to his then-young children “Hope Never Dies” by Andrew Shaffer, where “Barack Obama and Joe Biden are a crime-fighting duo. There’s a fistfight on an Amtrak train. Joe Biden slugs a guy. When I thought about it, Biggie and Yoko seemed like they might be a good crime-fighting duo.”

I was particularly struck by a continuation and new hope for Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash in the Bahamas at 22. She’d spent much of her too-short life being taken advantage of by nefarious elements, and had just started to take the reins of her career back when she died.

In Swartz’s imagination, in death she forever has autonomy. She’s free from an unnamed R. Kelly, “this man, this monster” who, she tells the otherwordly crowd, tried to take her dignity “when I was just a young, innocent child.” So in death she takes her power back by singing “I Believe I Can Fly” with Holly and Redding. It’s a triumphant moment, one I want for her.

Although he’s not part of a pair, Swartz said that the ultimate fantasy of helping a musical legend cheat death was inspired by his love of the music of the late John Lennon, who was married to Yoko Ono. “In a way, it occurred to me that these stories were an attempt to bring him back, to bring back my idol,” he said.

Swartz added that he was careful to be respectful of the memories of these very real people, and had heard from musician Gary Lucas, who’d played with Buckley. “He read it and loved it, which was a big relief.”

The unfortunate truth is that each generation has been and will be ever rocked by the loss of their creative idols. XXXTentacion and Juice WRLD, two of the artists that come up in rotation on my son’s Apple Music playlist, both died in their very early 20s. I hate to say that this is going to keep happening, but the idea of continuing a late artist’s life is in some ways hopeful, and then sad, because of the reality.

Swartz said that in the early part of the coronavirus pandemic, he took a walk with a writer friend and told her about his idea. “I said ‘This is really morbid and depressing,’ and she said ‘No. People are dying all around us. This is a way of expressing hope and reincarnation in a way.’ I’m not starting a new religion. It’s just part of believing that life continues after it’s over.”