MANY WORLDS

Stories about the Simulacra and the humans who live there are told by multiverse travelers, scientists, and ordinary people.

This diverse and vibrant short story collection pivots around the Simulacrum—an entity of an unknown origin that copies the world over and over, making changes along the way. These copies are called the Simulacra. Readers are first introduced to this concept in the tone-setting “Notes on the Form of the Simulacra,” written by co-editor Turnbull and taking the form of posts on an online forum. The researcher collecting these posts believes there may be a way to travel between altered worlds, and the stories that follow allow readers to do just that. They vary from “The Phantom of the Marley Valley High Auditorium for the Performing Arts” by Theodore McCombs, a captivating paranormal mystery about students going missing every year around their school's spring show, to co-editor Eure’s “To the Bottom,” an emotional and intriguing hard SF story about scientists diving to never-before-reached ocean depths. Darkly Lem’s “Blink,” the tale of a person forced to travel between worlds every fifth and seventh blink, and K.W. Onley’s “And So, What Do You Know?” in which two young Black girls are asked to change one thing about their world, are narrative triumphs with no words wasted, elegant and speculative in all the best ways. Psychiatrist Justin C. Key’s “On the Spectrum,” however, may turn off some readers even as it tries to be inclusive. Key seems hopeful that neurotypical readers will empathize with a neurodivergent experience by placing them in a world where they are the “neurodisadvantaged.” But the autism spectrum–coded “Typicals” here are unimaginative, cold, and inflexible, further “othering” them in our own world. Still, each story in this book asks readers to think not just about who they are and what they’d choose, but if they’d even want the choice—questions worth pondering long after the book is finished.

An intriguing, well-executed collection of SF and paranormal short stories, as varied as the multiverse they inhabit.