The most wildly entertaining book journeys around the multiverse

This book is a delirious romp through time and space with a political edge, which is enough to make me love it on its own. However, versions of the main character, Jerry Cornelius, pop up in just about all of Michael Moorcock’s work, including The Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, the Elric of Melnibone books and even his Dr. Who novel.

But wait! There’s more! Moorcock gave other writers permission to use the character, so he appears in other people’s works (including one of my novels). One of the first explorers of the concept of the multiverse, Michael Moorcock brilliantly paved the way for the rest of us.

There is a certain kind of literature that takes my breath away. In my experience, there is nothing more exhilarating than reading a book that you think is contemporary that veers, with the reader hardly noticing, into the speculative. I adore books that take the ordinary world and sprinkle it with magic and possibilities.

With this book, Matt Haig answers a question many of us contemplate: What if? What if I’d taken the other fork in the road? This book answers that question for one flawed, beautiful character, and I was enthralled with every page.  

Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood famously rocketed this book to the top of the bestseller list four years after its publication. Whatever you’ve heard about this inventive epistolary time travel romance, I promise you that it lives up to that hype. It won me over immediately with its lyrical prose, clever sci-fi conceit, and charged romantic tension between dueling protagonists.

I love dystopian fiction, but there’s something even more impressive about well-written utopian fiction. I’m even more impressed when authors remember that our various visions of utopia can be in conflict with one another and with our own individual connections and desires. Time War weaves poetry out of the multiverse and had me sobbing over two women who would rather burn down every world than lose each other.

This was the first science fiction I read that played with the idea of alternate history, and it cracked my brain wide open when I was a youngster! But I’ve recently reread it, and it still has such power.

The book shows a world in which the Axis won WWII. But it’s a multiverse book, too, because, in the novel, there is evidence that a universe exists in which the Allies won the war. Evidence that must be stamped out. The reality that Dick paints in this novel is just so compelling and depressingly real. It resonates even now and makes me think, what other paths of history could we have come down? Would they be worse or better? Or simply different? And what would it be like to know about those other worlds? 

Do you think this multiverse business is something new from MCU Labs? H.G. Wells wrote about parallel universes in this book back in 1923. 

Humble Mr. Barnstaple and some 1920 one-percenters pass through a dimensional rift into an alternate world called “Utopia.” Appropriately, there’s no disease or poverty, no war, and everybody’s into exploration and scientific progress. But there are also some worrying things (e.g. “eugenics-light”). Aldous Huxley’s anti-utopia Brave New World (1932) is partly a rebuttal of this book.

This book is more of a slow burn than the high impacts of wonder/terror in The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. However, the resolution of the story is ingenious, and Well’s vision of humanity’s destiny is still relevant after 101 years.