PARADOX

A married couple explore the mysteries of the multiverse in this SF novel.

The paraverse contains many alternate realities, each differing from the others in ways large or small. In this reality, husband-and-wife team John and Krylla Smith work as agents for the not-so-secret Division of Esoterica, or DivEs. As one character explains, “It’s not a division of anything, not really, just a loose collection of folks interested in everything from the Land of Oz to water sprites to little blue men from Mars. Doesn’t matter if such beings are real or not—they might be real, and that starts to get some high-powered people involved.” That dynamic group includes the Instrumentality, a prickly, all-seeing power that observes the many parallel realities and sometimes asks DivEs for a favor. The current one is for the Smiths to locate a poet named Yvor Grache, who has disappeared in a part of the paraverse controlled by a fascistic collective of bad guys known as Wessel. But Krylla misses the assignment because she tries to use the ladies’ room and it turns out to be a trap. She ends up in the Well of Time with a homologue—or alternative version—of herself. It’s a missing person case in a universe where there are infinite versions of every individual, and keeping them all straight may prove the biggest impediment to solving the crime. Perper and Cornog’s prose is inventive and wonderfully sharp even when it comes to describing abstract concepts of time and space. Here, Krylla is briefly one with all her homologues: “She was those Kryllas, and she knew what they felt and meant. Of course, external events retained their interest. For her, a oneness of many was merely a state of being, one that none of her had ever experienced before, but something she (they) accepted as a fact.” The novel itself is an intriguing collaboration between spouses through time. Cornog mentions in the endmatter that the couple wrote the first draft in the 1980s and worked on it together until Perper’s death in 2014. The book tells a thrilling, chimeric story with a big heart and an even bigger imagination.

A cerebral, mind-bending SF tale about identity across time and space.