Its gotta be a sound example of the frequency illusion that the moment I decide to write about the multiverse theme, I see it literally all over the damn place. And this time around I didn’t have to query with a new set of comps, yet here I am, reading these books anyway. I already covered The Space Between Worlds, but from there, I just kept running into this concept, and this was after I had written my sequel.
I need to come clean. I think I mentioned it in the Indie Deluge, but I may or may not have shifted a wee bit into reading more…. Uh… romance. It was part in parcel the fact that 1. Everyone who saw the cover of my first book led into the following conversation:
“Oh, that’s a romance!”
“No, its science fiction.”
“But there’s two people on the cover, that says romance.”
“But its cosmic horror AND lesbian romance.”
“So… It’s a romance.”
And 2: Savannah Thomas did a fantastic job narrating Space Station X, and I picked her for her dead-ringer Jax voice, but I also realized she is absolutely a romance narrator and with her special touch that book just bleeds through with romance. So I figured I needed to lean into it, and thus, some of the multiverse books I ran into were more romancey than science fiction-y. And then, of course, the more science-fiction-y books were lacking in romance. Sigh.
Okay, so what am I counting as “multiverse” in this recap? I guess any book that canonizes the potential for a different outcome or existence to occur in the broader span of the “universe” the book exists in, either by nature, or mystery. I guess that’s a definition I could use. I’ve run into the “butterfly effect” multiverse, where every world is a spinoff of some small action that occurred at one point that forced a timeline to deviate (Space Between Worlds). I have run into the “Some cosmic 3rd party decided that I can see multiple versions of myself” (the Devil She Knows) I have run into “the universe decided fuck you in particular, and we don’t know why” (Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon) And “There’s dragons. Why? Why not?” (Lady Hoppers). And I was entertained by them all, sure. Some of them had some other themes that exhausted me (the over-presence of far too-functional therapy-speaking queers is just a nail to my temple sometimes). And some were fun as hell, but lacking in the romance I was hoping for (Lady Hoppers). And before anyone stops me, yes all these books were some flavor of queer.
I also want to lay the following disclaimer: I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once. Or, okay, I attempted to, because it was being nominated for, and awarded, so much recognition. I just have a toddler and didn’t realize it was a 3-hour long movie. I may or may not have passed out a third of the way through and then woken up, drooling on my wife’s lap, to see a queer backrub scene done with feet because of hotdog fingers. I need to express how much I cannot even begin to aspire to that level of multiverse. That is god-tier. I may have fever-dreamed it. Who knows, I don’t have 3 hours to spare these days (its taken me all weekend just to try to write this post) to watch it again. My publisher wants to liken my new sequel to this movie. I am humbled. I’ll stick to covering the books I have read.
Right, so I gave The Space Between worlds its own post. It’s where I state: in a multiverse concept…[that’s] the whole damned point: slight differences across multitudes of realities. The multiverse comes into play where one Earth discovered world hopping, and characters can only travel between these worlds if they are already dead in the world they are going to. They can also only travel between worlds that are close enough to their current Earth, which leaves them with, like 350 Earths to travel between. Personally, I think I create 350 alternative Earths every morning just with my sock selection alone, but then again, I adhere more to the “butterfly effect” theory myself. In all, the multiverse story in this book was a good setting for a story where the existence of this multi-Earth concept was known, and not exactly novel. I spent a not insignificant amount of time bored by the story and instead wishing that I could peek into the more fucked up worlds at the fringes of their compatibility. I wanted to know where the cosmic unknown simply said “nah, too weird” and prevented visitors. Anyway I cover that book in greater detail elsewhere, but it was the first inkling I got that multiverse was more than “Into the spider-verse” or whatever Marvel is smoking these days.
Lady Hoppers was a bit more overt. Two kickass women in space suits just bouncing through tears in space-time, tangling with their alternative selves and encountering some wild shit. This one essentially took the stance that “eh, it’s a huge universe, of course there’s one out there where there are dragons, and the antics of the Fast and Furious franchise are the commanding elements of working physics.” And I do love a good “it’s an infinite universe, why not?” vibe. It did mean some truly absurd worlds, but then it was all just fun in the end. Truly just something that was a good romp. My issues were more that the two main characters were prime for a romance and then they made one of them ace. Which is fine. Cheers to ace readers. Just if it was MY universe, they would have fucked.
Enter the romance novels. The first one I read was Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon. It was… okay. The “multiverse” they speak of is more “The Lakehouse” than “Everything Everywhere”. Two women separated by a 4-month lag in text communications after one of them has already gone missing. The just need to convince the universe their pristinely perfect, emotionally sound, queer relationship is worthy of continuation past February. The sex was there this time. It came with therapist speak which is just not a form of foreplay I engage in. I give props for this book spending time on examining what the impact of one action can affect down stream in a universe. These two love-struck idiots aren’t able to keep their hands off each other so everyone else in their little circle gets to feel the whiplash as the wrinkles in space time iron themselves out. In the meantime there are glimpses into other universes to show that no matter what, they wind up together. Its sweet. I showed my wife, she read the back, and her response was “there is no way in hell I would have ever even picked that up.”
The Devil She Knows looks more romance-y than anything else, but it hit more wins than I was ready to allow. I can’t really call it a monster fucker, since the demon girl is mostly human looking and wearing a pink party dress the whole time. And I guess I also can’t really call it a multiverse, since its mostly demon girl showing the poor, hapless main what her life would be like if all her dreams came true. But either way, their little burning cinder of a romance was the best fire thus far. Hence… why it’s a romance novel. 100 points for lack of therapists, unless you count a 2000 year old demon eschewing her soul-saving grace to run an intervention on you about your shitty ex. Which… I’m willing to look the other way, since it leads to less clothing.
I feel like over the last couple years or so I have run into a ton of other multiverse examples, but at this point they seem to be running together in my head. Which I feel is quite poetic. So if I recall one maybe I’ll bounce back to review it, but instead I think I need to dive into the concept of the multiverse and why I think its popped up so much.
If I’m being honest, I think it’s a cop-out. What’s that? Am I including my own work in this? Absolutely. I distinctly decided to go the multiverse route because I was vain enough to think that if I had fans, and they wrote fan-fiction, I didn’t want anyone fighting over what was “canon”. Let’s roll it back a second to Harrow the Ninth. Notice my lack of fawning over this book. I have stated on the regular that my hero worship is for Gideon alone, but know a tactic when I see one. Muir (famous for her fan fiction roots?) went and made mini-alternate universe nods in her second book, covering everything from the place-swap to the coffee shop. Almost as if to say “yesssss, write your freaky little fan fictions about this, they are all truuuuuuuue.” I tip my hat at you ma’am. That is certainly one way to do it.
In my case this started as the thought that “I will never write a sequel.” I wanted this to be a standalone, that had zero follow on, leaving the world wondering at whatever could possibly happen next. I wanted the same moment my 5th grade class had when we read The Giver by Lois Lowery, where we spent a solid hour after the end of the book theorizing on what the hell actually happened, and hypothesizing that the sequel might explain it. The moment where my 5th grade teacher stated “If I know anything about Lois Lowery, she will never write a sequel,” left me with the burning realization that an author could torture us all and not shed a tear. So I aspired to the same level of devious. Whelp. Anyone with google can go figure out that I was in 5th grade before the year 2000 because Lois Lowery wrote FOUR fucking books in this quadrilogy. So much for being a sadist. No, instead I was left alone with my characters, bored and confined (it was still the pandemic) and so I determined “if I can’t leave everyone hanging, I’ll just confuse the hell out of them”. If the idea behind the end of the first book was that anything could happen, then the second book will do just that: anything will happen. Maybe I just really didn’t want to commit to any ONE thing. But then I started writing it.
I’m gonna get weird here. I’m not a religious person. And this is after spending 9 years at the most loving, caring, Christ-like school… I still decided it wasn’t for me. None of the big ones are. If I had to think about it too hard (and I got too much other stuff I my head for that without it turning into another novel) the whole concept that my actions can cause a split in the universe; that every decision leads to a Road A and a Road B, might be the closest I get to a legitimate faith. And I mean every choice, from every person, everywhere, even the dog, leading to an unfathomable amount of choices and changes and splits, and alternatives. You might think “but that’s just too much!” and I would say “sure, but its not like we know what’s at the other end of the universe. If the universe is infinite, then there can be infinite possibilities.” I think there actually are a couple religions dedicated to this, but, like I said, I’m not into ANY of them. Instead, I prefer to just be terrified by the idea that I have zero inkling (or control) over which one I am in. And I guess I can just pick and choose what days I can be comforted by this and what days I can be thoroughly freaked out by it. So I wrote a book instead.
Okay yeah, its still a vehicle for me to write my own lust-filled cosmic horror lesbian romance, but if I’m gonna write more than one book, and I’m gonna have my characters leave the first book on an ambiguous note, then I am absolutely going to start building my own lore around what it means for every choice and action to feed into the infinite possibilities of the universe. I subscribe pretty thoroughly to that “Butterfly Affect” concept: even a small action can ripple through realities and timelines to lead you to the weirdest conclusions, i.e. hotdog fingers, I guess.
So is my use of the multiverse concept a cop-out? Yeah, I didn’t want to commit to a particular canon and close myself off to the infinite array of alternatives. And, like, that’s okay. I have had a great time with all these other multiverse stories I have come across. It’s a concept I am satisfied seeing frequently in writing. It can’t be contained, by nature of its existence. There doesn’t have to be rules, since every universe has different rules. I like the freedom it grants to make literally anything happen. I think the true test of time is whether you can close the story successfully, or if you leave it dangling uncomfortably. I am telling myself this as I write it. I have work to do to tie my loose ends that I am just fraying all over the place. BUT…. That might be something I have already managed in this book. OR the next?
Space Wizard is holding their Year 4 Backerkit, which includes Fractal Terminus, the sequel to Space Station X. It needs all the help it can get, so go check it out!
AZ ROZKILLIS 