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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JEB" data-source="post: 9536220" data-attributes="member: 10148">Finished Multiverses: An Anthology of Alternate Realities, edited by Preston Grassmann. You'd think with that title it'd be a collection of, well, multiverse stories, but it's actually divided into three flavors:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Parallel Universes: Stories about what happens when the multiverse opens up to people. My top pick here was Paul Di Filippo's "Nine Hundred Grandmothers", about a drug addict experiencing the ultimate intervention.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Alternate Histories: More traditional counterfactuals, like Ken Liu's "A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel". Though it also includes "The Cartography of Sudden Death" by Charlie Jane Anders, which is a time travel story set in a completely unrecognizable (and presumably fictional) alternate timeline.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fractured Realities: Only fits the theme of the anthology in the loosest sense of the phrase, nearly all urban fantasy and/or weird fiction with a thin multidimensional theme. Honestly felt like stuff that should have been in an another anthology, even if some of the most engaging stories were here. (I particularly liked Annalee Newitz's "#Selfcare", where a beauty-products chain runs afoul of the fae, and Alix E. Harrow's "A Witch's Guide to Escape", about a magical public library.)</li> </ul>Overall, though, this is just an OK anthology - no bad stories, but no great ones either, just B/B+ material.(As a bonus, the book also includes (surprisingly tame) poetry by Clive Barker.)</blockquote>

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