WORLD LINES

In Diamond’s SF novel, various individuals circle experiments undertaken to explore and sort out tangled parallel worlds.

Visionary but profit-hungry Dr. Marco Spelling has obtained a Newfoundland mountain and outfitted its interior with a heavy-water pool as a neutrino-particle detector. This neutrino “mine” is not an altruistic project, but rather a speculative effort to make money by forecasting disasters on the theory that a jump in neutrino counts is an omen of coming catastrophe. A potential client is professor Nathan Sloan, a maverick scientist exploring the landscapes of alternate universes and variant timelines (“Spelling was a leader with no followers while the Professor was a leader who wanted no followers”). Sloan has created a vaguely sentient robot (or two) to detect likely mathematical points where timelines open portals to variant worlds. The widowed Sloan also groomed his daughter, Darien, to assist him in the decades-long endeavor, but Darien has opted to join the U.S. military instead, becoming an able fighter pilot. When her lover vanishes through a portal in an Egyptian pyramid during a Sloan expedition, Darien steals her favorite jet and robot to attempt a rescue, but she crash lands in Libya. Threaded through this narrative web are “Alternates,” shape-shifting humans with an innate ability to dwell in non-linear timelines. One of these rarities, McBarrister, has tasked himself with trying to correct the disarray in the cosmos spawned by Sloan and Spelling’s meddling. With chapters set off by light verses and limericks, the novel is humorous in the vein of SF master R.A. Lafferty’s work, with perhaps a touch of James Thurber (and dialogue punch-ups by Tom Stoppard). The narrative stutter-steps in a back-and-forth chronology, and the text often addresses the reader directly while emphasizing that this is but a yarn—though one with a startlingly downbeat ending. The pseudonymous author, a scientist in real life, includes an introduction to clarify the basic plotline (an indicator of the potential confusion ahead); he reveals that a partial inspiration for the tale was, of all things, the 1959 Disney live-action fantasy film Darby O’Gill and the Little People.

Diverting, seriocomic SF exploring causality, wormholes, life, death, God, philosophy, and funny physics.