The Space Between Worlds

"Micaiah Johnson has imagined a world in which the multiverse exists, and you can hop from one universe to another, but you can only do that if you don’t have a counterpart there. So if you have died or were just never born, you can go there. If you attempt to go there, and you exist, you suffer a horrible death. This means that people who are very likely to have died young, basically from being a marginalised member of society, then become extremely highly valued – they can go to a lot more universes than someone who had all of the privilege of a safe upbringing. Our protagonist Cara can go to 372 worlds, and there are only eight that she can’t go to. Then one of her eight remaining doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, in ways that make her think that this person was murdered, and probably murdered by someone that she herself had a past with. But maybe not – because every doppelganger is a little bit different. So trying to figure out who did the murdering and how, and what the circumstances are around it, is really interesting. There’s more than one murder, and each question unlocks a different question. It’s dealing with class and race and corporate greed. I think it’s wonderful. Yes! There are parts of it that are definitely a thriller, which give it that clipping-along momentum… But a lot of it is character portrait. In one of the worlds, she has the opportunity to see family members who had died in her own world. She has an extremely complicated reaction – they are expecting her to be someone else, and she has to be that someone else; and she’s seeing these people who are almost the people that she loves, but not quite. There are parts of it that are really, really moving, exploring all the emotional and social implications of the initial science fiction setup. Yeah, I do tend to lean towards that apparently!"

"The multiverse is real, and travel between worlds is possible – but landing in a world where a version of you is alive will kill you on arrival. Consequently, the wealthy and powerful who want to plunder alternate worlds of resources and information need the most marginal people to do their dirty work for them: Only those whose existence is a small miracle can “traverse” effectively. Enter Cara, one of the best traversers – because in over 300 worlds, versions of her are only alive in eight. An absolutely stunning thriller, queer and fierce and smart: think Fury Road meets Orphan Black."