I would like to thank Titan for an advance copy of this anthology in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Titan

Published - Out Now

Price - £9.99 paperback £4.68 Kindle eBook

A mind-blowing anthology of 18 stories bringing you the infinite Earths of the multiverse.

Featuring Alix E. Harrow, Clive Barker, Ken Liu, Charlie Jane Anders, Annallee Newitz, Alastair Reynolds and more.

Imagine infinite Earths, an endless universe containing every possible world. What if the mistakes we make be taken back? What if the war wasn’t won, or that life wasn’t saved, or that heart wasn’t broken?

Explore the infinite potential of the multiverse with the finest minds writing in science fiction today, and see what could have been…

It definitely has been an interesting trend this year of multiverse related tales. From MR Carey’s Infinity Gate and Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory tales exploring if can we live our lives slightly differently are striking a chord with readers and storytellers. This is not necessarily a new idea in SF but certainly one that is having a resurgence. In Pressman’s Grassman’s entertaining anthology Multiverses - An An Anthology of Alternate Realities a galaxy of great authors have different spins on the idea making it a very good way at exploring how this theme can be used.

Grassman has constructed the anthology into three sections. Starting with the most apt Parallel Worlds. In Alastair Reynold’s Banish - we have a clever spin on something we tend normally to see in time travel. Surgeons working on a patient who in their universe is a war criminal and in this one is not. A fascinating moral dilemma about what to do next with an unusual but powerful solution. I really was impressed by Chana Porter’s Cracks where our lead character keeps meeting other versions of herself - thinner; better looking; gay, straight rich and poor and the reader has to decide if this is in the character’s mind as they dream of what they could have been or is this the universe saying its time for some more changes to their own life? The anthology has a very good global dimension and moving to Bangalore we get in Jayaprakah Satyamurthy’’s A Threshold Hypothesis a tale that first just lets us experience a city that appears to have crossing over points into other versions; then an academic look at the city with a love letter to many of SF’s famous tales and then a very disquieting explanation for it all that makes the whole tale appear a sign of dark things to come. One of my favourites in the collection. In a similar yet different fashion the deceptively cute titled Crunchables by Ian McDonald has a suburban couple trying to live life and feed pets with the regular rewriting of realities all around them. What appears funny also feels like people trying to survive a disaster out of their control in the best way that they can. In this section I also really enjoyed Nine Hundred Grandmothers by Paul Di Fillipo has the cunning idea of an intervention for a drug addict moving into drug dealer that involves entire multiverses of himself and family coming to tell him to change - funny and just a little unsettling too!

There is a shorter but very interesting section named Alternate Histories (one I wish we had seen more of) with Ken Liu retelling the 20th century in A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel which imagines no WW2 as the world powers focus on building a huge underground transport mechanism but Liu posits that other crimes and dark events would have taken place similar but different. Its a tale that slowly makes you realise the alternate history may still have horrible crimes to face. A really impressive tale as is Thirty-six Alternate Views of Mount Fuji by Rumi Kaneko - mysterious artefacts that are not possible are inspected by an art historian and they have much more worrying consequences for our main character than she expects. I really liked the depth given to the other history we hear about which makes th later scenes work very smartly.

I didn’t quite gel with Fractured Realities and that felt more this pushed the boundaries of the anthology as it is more incursions with futures. In this section ~Selfcare by Annalee Newitz mixes horro witha very american business type of hellspace.. The Setr by Eugen Bacon has a charcetr facing for no explainable reasons constan rewriting of their lives using a TV style format. There is a charming space rescue in Amber Too Red, Like Ember by Yukimi Ogawa but I was slightly non-plused by A Witch’s Guide to escape by Alix E Harrow which is a librarian of other worlds helping a depressed teenager but suspect giving them Harry Potter to read may be a very outdated suggestion; the whole tale felt a little too pleased with the power of books to change lives but felt very 20th century in approach.

This is a very entertaining anthology and Grassman has successfully assembled a great variety of spins on the core theme that should help readers think about how SF has tackled the subject but also a great way of finding some of our genre’s most interesting voices. Well worth a look!