Multiverses
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
Worlds in Waiting: An Introduction – Preston Grassmann
PARALLEL WORLDS
Banish – Alastair Reynolds
Cracks – Chana Porter
A Threshold Hypothesis – Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Crunchables – Ian McDonald
Quorum’s Eye – Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
Nine Hundred Grandmothers – Paul Di Filippo
Days of Magic, Nights of War – Clive Barker
ALTERNATE HISTORIES
A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel – Ken Liu
Thirty-six Alternate Views of Mount Fuji – Rumi Kaneko (translated by Preston Grassmann)
The Cartography of Sudden Death – Charlie Jane Anders
The Rainmaker – Lavie Tidhar
The Imminent World – D.R.G. Sugawara
FRACTURED REALITIES
#Selfcare – Annalee Newitz
A Witch’s Guide to Escape – Alix E. Harrow
Amber Too Red, Like Ember – Yukimi Ogawa
The Set – Eugen Bacon
There is a Hole, There is a Star – Jeffrey Thomas
There was a Time – Clive Barker
Acknowledgements
About the Author
ALSO BY PRESTON GRASSMANN
AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
Out of the Ruins
Edited by
PRESTON GRASSMANN
TITAN BOOKS
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MULTIVERSES
AN ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE REALITIES
Print edition ISBN: 9781803362328
E-book edition ISBN: 9781803362335
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: March 2023
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
‘Worlds in Waiting: An Introduction’ © Preston Grassmann 2023
‘Banish’ © Alastair Reynolds 2023
‘Cracks’ © Chana Porter 2023
‘A Threshold Hypothesis’ © Jayaprakash Satyamurthy 2015.
Originally published in Weird Tales of a Bangalorean. Used by permission of the author.
‘Crunchables’ © Ian McDonald 2023
‘Quorum’s Eye’ © Alvaro Zinos-Amaro 2023
‘Nine Hundred Grandmothers’ © Paul Di Filippo 2023
‘Days of Magic, Nights of War’ © Clive Barker 2004.
Originally published in Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War. Used by permission of the author.
‘A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel’ © Ken Liu 2013.
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder.
Used by permission of the author.
‘Thirty-six Alternate Views of Mount Fuji’ © Rumi Kaneko 2023
‘The Cartography of Sudden Death’ © Charlie Jane Anders 2014.
Originally published at Tor.com, edited by Patrick Nielson Hayden. Used by permission of the author.
‘The Rainmaker’ © Lavie Tidhar 2023
‘The Imminent World’ © D.R.G. Sugawara 2023
‘#Selfcare’ © Annalee Newitz 2021.
Originally published at Tor.com, edited by Lindsey Hall. Used by permission of the author.
‘A Witch’s Guide to Escape’ © Alix E. Harrow 2018. Originally published in Apex Magazine.
Used by permission of the author.
‘Amber Too Red, Like Ember’ © Yukimi Ogawa 2023
‘The Set’ © Eugen Bacon 2023
‘There is a Hole, There is a Star’ © Jeffrey Thomas 2023
‘There was a Time’ © Clive Barker 2023
Interior art © Yoshika Nagata 2023
The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the author of their work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
“The Duchess . . . was resolved to make a world of her own invention, and this world was composed of sensitive and rational self-moving matter.”
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
“Imagining a world creates it, if it isn’t already there.”
N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became
WORLDS IN WAITING:
AN INTRODUCTION
PRESTON GRASSMANN
Even within our beloved genre of science fiction, so accepting of new ideas and perspectives, there are those who prefer to set limits and guidelines, as if to protect their sacred temples from the vines of strangler trees. Fortunately, there are many more of us who turn to the genre for its inclusiveness, to celebrate the kind of diversity that foreshadows and calls into being a world of heterogeneous complexity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our celebration of the “multiverse,” where divergence and difference are its raison d’être, and whether it’s books like Kindred by Octavia Butler, the MCU, or the diamond glare of Moorcock’s myriad suns, there is something in it for everyone.
Long before the “multiverse” became the pop-culture buzzword of modern science fiction, the notion of other universes and worlds existing in parallel with our own is as old as science itself. A third-century BCE philosopher named Chrysippus made the claim that our world was in a state of eternal regeneration, prefiguring the concept of many universes existing over time. It was part of Ancient Greek atomism, which proposed that colliding atoms could bring about an infinity of parallel worlds. However, it wasn’t until 1873 that the word itself made its first appearance in an issue of Scientific American, in which William Donovan referred to it in a debate about planetary motion and God: “The Great Mechanic presides over a universe, and not merely a cohering multiverse.” Thirty years later, the word reappeared in a lecture by the philosopher-psychologist William James, who referred to the indifference of nature as “a moral multiverse… and not a moral universe.” But as with many endeavors in science, the idea of parallel worlds began in early examples of science fiction (or proto-science fiction). In The Blazing World (1666), for example, Margaret Cavendish refers to a utopian world that exists parallel to our own. In Men Like Gods (1923), H.G. Wells writes about an alternate Earth in a far-future utopia. Despite the abundance of examples in the genre, it wasn’t until the publication of Michael Moorcock’s The Blood Red Game and Sundered Worlds that the “multiverse” became a literary phenomenon. From that point on, it took root and broke through the genre like the banyan trees striving for World Tree status, extending into every part of science fiction. Although it appeared in early hard s
cience fiction, like Isaac Asimov’s End of Eternity and Greg Egan’s Diaspora, it opened into the alternate histories of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration. It emerges in the fantasy of the Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones and The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. It extends outwards, giving rise to new subgenres with works like Paul Di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. Thankfully, the multiverse is worlds-wide, as broad-ranging and all-inclusive as the word itself implies.
At the very core of all science fiction is the question “what if?” What if surgical operations could be performed between one universe and another, as we see in “Banish” by Alastair Reynolds? What if we could view different versions of ourselves in others, as in “Cracks” by Chana Porter? What if a transpacific tunnel had been built after World War I, connecting the US and Japan, as in Ken Liu’s “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel”? The question can be asked of both the past and the future, or a present that offers a multiplicity of choices, of worlds unlike ours. It can be seen in the dream-logic reality of Yukimi Ogawa’s “Amber Too Red, Like Ember,” and Alix E. Harrow’s world of witch-librarians in “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies.” In some form, the question is at the heart of every story in this book, and the myriad answers on offer are never short of compelling. What better way to celebrate the wide-ranging, kick-ass diversity of our genre than with an anthology of multiverse stories. If you yearn for original stories about other universes, alternate histories (and futures), and parallel worlds, then you’ve come to the right place.
If ever there was a time when we were in need of a multiverse, it’s here and now, when all the future worlds of the past have collapsed into some other timeline that some of us would rather escape from. It is with that spirit in mind, with a scope as wide as its title implies, that I’ve included a broad range of stories here, from a diverse gathering of international voices. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.
PARALLEL
WORLDS
“Ghosts are, as it were, shreds
and fragments of other worlds”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
BANISH
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
The call came in on a Monday afternoon, a little after three. Within half an hour I had reviewed my caseload for the rest of the week, spoken to my usual surgical team, bribed and arm-twisted colleagues, arranged workarounds where possible, and apologised to those patients whose procedures might need to wait until I returned. By four, I had confirmed my availability and travel arrangements were already falling into place.
I left the hospital, drove home and explained to Fabio that I had been summoned to Geneva.
Fabio watched, leaning against the doorframe, hand on hip as I threw things into a grubby plastic suitcase. I kept an overnight bag on standby but I expected to be away for at least the duration of the window.
“What’s the case?”
“A tricky one. Tumour at the base of the brain, hard to reach, and in risky territory.”
“Tiger country.”
“Exactly.” He had been living with me long enough to pick up the lingua franca of surgeons. “We need to get the tumour out without doing too much damage on the way, and make sure the margins are completely clean. Then there’s some bone under the skull that doesn’t look good on the scans, so that also needs to come out.” I paused, dithering over exactly how many pairs of underwear I really needed. “The other side are printing up a ceramic scaffold, ready for when we go in.”
Fabio nodded. “But you’ve done something similar, or they wouldn’t bring you in?”
“Three similar ones. Two went pretty well.”
“And the third?”
“A disaster.” I looked up from my packing. “That still makes me and my team about the best possible hope for this patient.”
“Isn’t there a version of your team over there?”
“Evidently not, or they wouldn’t go to this much trouble.” I shoved a ski-patterned winter jumper into the case, then took it out again. It would be much colder in Geneva than Johannesburg, but I doubted that I’d be spending much time outdoors.
“How long do you have?”
“Overnight flight, arriving early morning Tuesday. From what they’re telling us, our window stays open until somewhere between Thursday evening and Friday morning. Back by Saturday evening at the latest, I’d imagine.” I drifted to my bedside table, thinking of taking something to read. As always there was a teetering pile of prose and technical literature. I picked up the small, orange-backed collection of Christina Aroyo poetry I had been working through lately, then put it back down again. Who was I kidding? What with the medical reading I needed to do, the planning and preparation ahead of the surgery, and then the small matter of the operation itself, I’d be wiped out by the time I got back to my bed.
“You’re learning,” Fabio said, smiling as he read my thought process.
“Slowly.”
We kissed goodbye as a black Mercedes arrived outside. Bang on time. I slung my case in the back, got in, waved to Fabio as the car moved off. The driver nodded at me through the rear-view mirror, but said nothing through the glass of his Covid screen. It was a frictionless ride to the airport, traffic easy and the lights all green, allowing us to speed through intersections. Strings were being pulled at all levels, with nothing left to chance.
By the time I got to the terminal, just before six, Bruno and Fillipe were already there, bags at their feet. We greeted each other with the wariness of old friends summoned to battle, caught between the excitement of a challenge and the burden of expectation now placed upon us.
“We lose tonight travelling, and then tomorrow we have to coordinate with the local surgical teams,” Bruno said, scratching his chin with a familiar complaining look. “That’s a lot of lost time, when we’re already up against it.”
“It is not as bad as it seems,” Fillipe said, always one to look on the bright side. “We cannot go in until the scaffold is printed, and that will not be until Wednesday morning.”
I frowned. “What’s keeping them?”
Bruno shouldered his Adidas bag. “They’re a few years behind us when it comes to 3-D printing. On the plus side, we’re handling the computer design work, so that part can be done quickly.”
“You’re better briefed than me.”
He shrugged. “I read on the ride in. But don’t worry. Plenty of time to catch up on the flight.”
Half an hour later we were wheels up, all of us sitting together in a window row. As soon as the seat-belt light went off, I folded down my tray-table and powered up my Chromebook. I connected to the Swissair Wi-Fi and delved into my email. Bunching up at the top, in and around the usual admin messages, were a set of patient files, medical images and secure hyperlinks, all of them originating from a dedicated World Health Organization account.
The plane banked, golden glare from the setting sun cutting across my screen. I leaned over Bruno and tugged down the plastic window shield.
“Basal meningioma,” I said, beginning to skim through the patient notes again now that the immediate rush was over. “Man in his sixties, in otherwise good health. It’s a displacing rather than infiltrating tumour, so that’ll help with the suction. Margins should be obvious. We shouldn’t have to remove too much healthy tissue.”
“The bone is a mess,” Fillipe commented.
“Yes. Looks mushy. But there’s plenty of good bone around the bad, for anchoring the scaffold.” I used the tracker pad to zoom in on one of the scans, where a gridded pattern indicated the intended placement of the printed implant. “Do you think we might want to be a little more conservative with those margins?”
“We’ll talk it through with the other side,” Bruno said unconcernedly.
I browsed through the documents, piecing together a gradually clearer picture of the wor
k ahead of us. I was already visualising surprises, pitfalls and the possible dodges we might use to get out of them.
“You know, this is tricky,” I said, “but I’m surprised they bounced it all the way up to World Health. It’s flattering to us that they want our expertise, but I’m surprised they felt their own teams weren’t up to the job.”
Bruno tore into a packet of salted peanuts. “Maybe they’re as behind on neurosurgery as they are on 3-D printing.”
I nodded half-heartedly, but deep down I knew it was unlikely. The worlds where we had already done remote surgery tended to be at a similar level to our own across a range of scientific, medical and engineering disciplines, rarely being more than five to ten years out of step in any one area. That was how it needed to be: what the quantum engineers called a “multiversal self-selection effect”. There were countless worlds out there with vastly different histories to our own, but unless they had been doing very similar experiments in quantum computation, with similar technical setups, the odds were against a window opening up between us and them in the first place.
I read for four hours, then spent the rest of the eleven-hour flight trying to get some sleep ahead of a full day’s work. By the time we touched down in Zurich I was in that brittle, jangling state of semi-alertness, red-eyed and overdosed on lukewarm coffee. A small executive plane took us to Geneva, where a smiling, relieved WHO delegation met us with a black limousine and a full police escort. It was mid morning on Tuesday, cold and foggy, a contrast to the last time I had been here, in the full bloom of spring. I barely had time to blink before we were driving into the sleek, glass-fronted WHO complex. There was just time to check in to our allocated rooms, have a quick shower and freshen up before we were ushered into a windowless, wood-panelled teleconferencing suite.
Coffee arrived while technicians fussed over the link to the other side. The signal was good, but it needed constant nursing. On a previous visit I’d asked if we could see the quantum computer down in the basement, the one that was whispering to its counterpart in the other version of the WHO. I was gently discouraged; apparently it looked just like any other room full of gently humming, LED-blinking cabinets, and the technicians got itchy whenever someone got too close to their baby.