This universe is getting to be a lot. As if troubling political trends, climate change, and a rising billionaire class weren’t bad enough, the space beyond our little blue planet is equally full of horrors. I recently learned about a black hole called TON 618 that has a diameter as large as THE ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM. I don’t care if it’s billions of lightyears away, I don’t feel comfortable sharing a universe with that cosmic monstrosity. I need a vacation to a parallel universe where black holes are manageable. While I won’t find refuge in this reality, I can in the pages of these fantasy and sci-fi books about parallel universes. Too bad I might need to travel through a wormhole to get there – which is basically a black hole’s cousin.
Woman On The Edge of Time
A seminal work of feminist sci-fi, Marge Piercy’s Woman On The Edge of Time is the story of Consuelo “Connie” Ramos, a Mexican-American woman who is unjustly incarcerated in an 1970’s mental institution. One day, she gets a visitor… from outside of reality. Connie is contacted by an androgynous envoy of the year 2137, who shows her utopian future where humanity is freed from social prejudice and economic hardship. Great news! Trouble is, Connie’s visitor has unwittingly created a butterfly effect in the past, and Connie’s awareness of this someday-utopia has caused today’s reality to shift. Connie soon learns that the bright future she foresaw is only one outcome of the world, the other is a hyper-capitalist hellscape predicated on social oppression. In order to secure the temporal paradise of tomorrow, Connie engages in a one-woman rebellion in the present. The future will be hers, whether her captors like it or not.
The Dark Tower
The central spoke around which Stephen King’s multiverse revolves, The Dark Tower is a mish-mash of the King of Horror’s entire oeuvre. This seven part mega-novel was inspired by the poem 19th century poem Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came, and features a protagonist that King created while still a teenager: the gunslinger knight-errant Roland Deschain. On a quest to find obscure architecture, Roland traipses across a multiversal wasteland in pursuit of his goal. As romantically idealistic as he is chillingly pragmatic, Roland recruits a squad of gunslingers-in-training from our own universe to aid him on his chivalric quest. Multiple characters and settings from other Stephen King novels appear in this series, including a cameo from the author himself. It’s a delightfully weird, whacky, horrifying and profound epic, best enjoyed after first reading through the rest of King’s work. Or just The Stand, Hearts In Atlantis, and Salem’s Lot – you’ll get the gist.
His Dark Materials
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman is the story of Lyra Belacqua, a little girl on a quest to kill God. Hailing from a version of Earth almost but not quite like our own, Lyra learns about a metaphysical secret of the universe that a world-ruling church would rather keep under wraps. After getting her hands on a magic compass that lets her communicate with angels, Lyra vaults across the multiverse in headlong pursuit of spiritual understanding. Along the way, she meets a young boy from our own universe, and the pair unwittingly set out on a quest to topple the Kingdom of Heaven itself – and fall in love in the process. Ex-Catholics and Conclave stans are gonna love this on.
Dark Matter
Adapted into a dizzying sci-fi miniseries by the author himself, Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter is a gripping thriller about a college physics professor who is knocked unconscious while on the way home to his family, only to wake up in a reality where he never married. Rather than settling down with his not wife, Jason Dessen learns that he spent this reality pursing a career as a quantum physicist who created a device that allows people to jump between all possible realities. The novel is inspired by a real quantum physics idea called the “many worlds” theory, which posits that in every time an outcome occurs, another universe is created where the opposite outcome took place. The result will bend your mind harder than a milkshake straw, just like it did poor Jason’s.
Anxiety Is The Dizziness of Freedom
A bite-sized tale from sci-fi short story master Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is The Dizziness of Freedom is part of the author’s Exhalation: Stories anthology. In a technologically advanced future, society has been rocked by the invention of the “prism” – essentially an iPhone if iPhones were metaphysical anomalies that allowed you to talk to parallel versions of yourself. Able to see the far-flung consequences of each individual choice, society has a total nervous breakdown. Ever noticed how Trader Joe’s only carries one brand of each food? This is to eliminate the “tyranny of choice,” a social phenomenon where an overabundance of options causes people to feel discomfort rather than joy. Chiang paints the picture of a reality where choice rules with an iron fist, and humanity is rendered paralyzed as a result.
A Darker Shade of Magic
Unlike Anxiety Is The Dizziness of Freedom, V.E. Schwab mercifully limits our choice of realties to a mere four in her novel A Darker Shade of Magic. In this magical multiverse, there are four Londons: Red, White, Grey and Black – each with its own unique relationship to the arcane. The novel centers around Kell, an ambassador from Red London with the unique ability to travel between universes (which he uses to smuggle contraband between different Londons as a side hustle). After being pickpocketed by a street-savvy Grey Londoner, Kell and his robber learn that the nicked magical stone has a dangerous connection to Black London – a place where magic dried up long ago. If the pair don’t want the remaining Londons to end up similarly leeched of their magic, they’ll need to come with a solution to return the stone to Black London where it belongs.
Kill Six Billion Demons
Written and illustrated by Tom Parkinson Morgan, Kill Six Billion Demons is the greatest graphic novel you’ve never heard of. Before she was kidnapped by a runaway god, barista and business major Allison Ruth had only one goal: lose her virginity. After she was spirited away to Throne, the central spoke around which the 777,777 universes revolve, her priorities shifted. Stuck in a version of Heaven with the charm of a picked corpse, Allison will need to learn to master the sacred power the runaway god bestowed upon her before unsavory divinities can get their mitts on it. With the help of an angelic martial arts teacher and an infernal sapphic lover, Allison may just become the prophesied hero the multiverse needs. And she might get lucky in the process, if yaknowaddamean. Part progression anime, part religious text, part fantasy/sci-fi romp, and my personal favorite graphic novel of all time.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January
The Ten Thousand Doors of January is the story of January Scaller, a young woman who lives in a 20th century mansion. Jealous? Don’t be. With the way that her wealthy guardian treats her, the lonely January might as well just be a piece of the architecture. January’s dim reality brightens when she’s enlightened through the pages of a book – one that tells the story of a woman who found doorways to other worlds. What January thought was fiction soon proves itself to be fact after she realizes the book is a chronicle of her own life, and may give clues to the whereabouts of her missing father. Daddy dearest may no longer be in this reality, but he’s certain to turn up in another, and January will keep bashing down multiversal doors until she finds him.
This Is How You Lose The Time War
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose The Time War is about a conflict between two parallel universes, and a pair of lovers caught in the crossfire. Red and Blue are two agents from seperate time traveling empires, who are engaged in a strategic struggle for dominance over the future. In order to secure tomorrow’s victory, Red and Blue are told to tamper with yesterday – and thwart each other’s best laid plans in the process. As the pair get to know one another through a series of letters, they discover that the only “best laid” thing in all the multiverse is the other – they burn to touch one another. Looking for a sapphic love story that will convince you to betray a nation in the name of devotion? This Is How You Lose The Time War is your road map to temporal treason.
The Space Between Worlds
Hoping to escape capitalism in a parallel universe? Sadly, The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson will burst your dimensional bubble. Set in a world where travel between parallel universes is possible so long as your alternate self is dead in the reality you want to visit, corporations profit off of data collected from other existences. Cara is one such data collector, uniquely qualified for the job due to the abysmal luck of her many dead doppelgängers. After one of her few remaining selves expires under mysterious circumstances, Cara begins to suspect that foul play is, well, at play. Part meditation on social class, part sci-fi thriller, this novel will have your mind buzzing with all the quantum possibilities.
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