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As part of a personal project, I'm compiling a list of works of fiction that involves the concept of the multiverse. Importantly, it's not just "alternate timelines/dimensions exist" - I want stuff where the key idea is "MANY MANY". Here's what I've got so far. ==== BOOKS AND SERIES * John DeChancie's Castle Perilous series * Zelazny's Amber series * Geary Gravel - Fading Worlds series * Micaiah Johnson - The Space Between Worlds (where only poor people can explore the multiverse) * Fred Pohl - Coming of the Quantum Cats * Neil Gaiman / Michael Reeves / Mallory Reeves - Interworld series * Mike Sirota - Ultimate Bike Path series * Heinlein - Number of the Beast * Seanan McGuire - Wayward Children series * Mike Carey - Infinity Gate * Alix Harrow - A Spindle Splintered series * Greg Egan - Quarantine * John Barnes - Timeline Wars series * Crawford Kilian - Empire of Time * Nick O'Donohoe's Crossroads series NOVELLAS, SHORT STORIES * Larry Niven - "All the Myriad Ways" * Lawrence Watt-Evans - "An Infinity of Karens", "New Worlds", "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" * Sarah Pinsker - "And Then There Were (N - 1)" * Damon Knight - "What Rough Beast" *Jack Vance - "Rumfuddle" * Ted Chiang - "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" * Murray Leinster - "Sidewise in Time" * Asimov - "Living Space" * Naomi Kritzer - "Evil Opposite" * John Wiswell - "I'll Miss Myself" * Charlie Jane Anders - "Six Months, Three Days" * Beth Goder - "Murder or a Duck" * Alfred Bester - "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" * Douglas Smith - "If I Should Fall Behind" * John Scalzi - "Missives from Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results" * Bleu Neustifter - "Unknown Number" * L. Sprague de Camp's "Enchanter" stories * Kelly Robson - "Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach" OTHER * comics - Crisis on Infinite Earths, Exiles, Captain Britain Corps, America Chavez, "Cross-Time Caper", "Nexus of All Realities" * TV: Sliders, Rick and Morty, "Parallels" (Star Trek TNG) * Devon Avery - "One-Minute Time Machine" (on youtube) * movies: Everything Everywhere All at Once, The One (Jet Li), Spiderverse - Groundhog Day? * webcomics: Kris Straub's Starslip Crisis, Jonah Yu from Skin Horse Anything else?
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Feb 27, 2025 17:20
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| # ? Dec 14, 2025 00:54 |
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Public service announcement: Don't Read Number of The Beast! If you feel like you are really missing out just read the last chapter. But you aren't. Niven has a whole anthology, Flight of the Horse, on the subject of an organization with a faulty time machine trying to make the best of going to other dimensions. If you need something a bit lighter Keith Laumer had The World Shuffler. Technically that whole series is in another dimension but that is the most relevant one. H. Beam Piper had the Paratime series about a civilization exploiting alternate timelines. I think the only one I remember reading is Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. Mostly because a posthumous anthology revealed it was a rework of a "visiting another planet that just happens to have humans on it," story. edit: webcomic completionist disorder compels me to mention https://arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/0001.htm
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Feb 27, 2025 22:24
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Just FYI, Crisis on Infinite Earths was an event tying up nearly 50 years of comic book history and will probably not make a whole lot of sense in isolation if you don't read at least the wikipedia article for it beforehand. For the Other category: The Alternate History Forums, including their wiki -- Some of these are really good, though as with anything written on the internet, it's a bit of a diamond-in-the-rough situation. Includes a subforum about this very subject (books and media). GURPS Infinite Worlds -- an RPG supplement dealing with the mechanics of alternate realities, the organization that explores them and their cross-time enemies. I've never played it but it's still a fun read, listing a bunch of worlds with varied points of divergence for potential game settings, as well as technically folding in every other setting under the GURPS umbrella as viable alternate realities.
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Mar 11, 2025 01:50
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Stephen Baxter plus Terry Pratchett's Long Earth series maybe? The idea is that there's an infinite number of alternate Earths, each just a "step" away from the ones "next to" it. It's very easy for anyone to build a gadget that will let them step. You can step in two directions, arbitrarily labeled east and west. Each step is an Earth where something went a tiny bit differently. The "nearby" ones are almost indistinguishable from ours, but they get weirder and weirder as you get into the hundreds of thousands or millions of steps. Humans only exist on our Earth. I can't *recommend* it, as I didn't particularly like it and didn't finish, but you might. Presto fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Mar 11, 2025 |
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Mar 11, 2025 20:58
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Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
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Mar 13, 2025 21:37
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Changing Planes by Ursula K. LeGuin seems like it would fit your criteria
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Mar 14, 2025 20:34
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Greg Bear's Eon engages with a fun version of this concept. ETA: also, while it's not explicitly about multiverses it addresses many of the same ideas: Jorge Juis Borges' short work The Library of Babel
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Mar 21, 2025 18:02
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The children's fantasy series collectively under the name Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones is based on magic users having access to multiple, minutely different worlds.
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Jun 24, 2025 01:20
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Dennis E Taylors Outland series is sort of in the same vein as the Long Earth series
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Jun 30, 2025 03:58
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Has Sanderson actually written anything that uses the Cosmere as a main plot point yet? Or is it all still random crossover characters, nods, and set-up? If not, he's getting there eventually. AlternateNu fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Jul 1, 2025 |
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Jul 1, 2025 01:16
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I know some of the later Elric novels went pretty deep into multiverse, and it shows early in a couple of short stories as well. But can't remember which ones on the top of my head.
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Jul 3, 2025 13:15
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Jul 6, 2025 15:50
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| # ? Dec 14, 2025 00:54 |
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Angepain fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Jul 7, 2025 |
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Jul 7, 2025 22:40
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