Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Alex, and I’m coming at you with new releases and a little multiverse theme. I hope that no matter what universe you live in, you had a most excellent week. Maybe even one that involved cake, since I firmly believe that cake is S-tier in every universe. Stay safe out there, space pirates, and I’ll see you on Tuesday!
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Let’s make the world a better place, together. Here’s somewhere to start: Entertainment Community Fund, which supports entertainment workers impacted by the strikes.
Bookish Goods
Multiverse Anniversary Card by KraftStreetPaperCo
Since I’m on a bit of a multiverse kick, that’s what I went looking for on Etsy…and I cannot get over how cute this nerdy little anniversary card is. And it’s printed on recycled cardstock! $6
New Releases
The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni
Mike Brink was once a rising star in football until a trumatic brain injury that caused him to acquire a rare savant syndrome. This gave him the ability to solve puzzles in ways no other can understand — and construct them as well. This skill causes him to be called on by the psychiatrist of murderer Jess Price, who hasn’t spoken for five years, but has drawn a strange puzzle. Mike is drawn into first the cipher, then the far more dangerous mysteries behind it, deeper than a simple murder.
Many Worlds: Or, the Simulacra edited by Cadwell Turnbull and Josh Eure
This anthology is a collection of stories by authors building a shared multiverse together. The tales are strange, transformational, subversive, and transgressive, ranging from the depths of internet conspiracy forums that might be on to something to interstellar telepaths touching on unknowable cosmic forces.
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
Riot Recommendations
Multiverses are not as common in fiction as I would have thought — though they might be making a major commercial start thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, who knows. But there are still some other good books with multiverse stories!
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
Am I going to take this opportunity to once again plug the absolute best book I’ve read in the last decade? You bet your butts I will. In a dystopian world wracked by climate disasters and worse, multiverse travel has been discovered — and it’s used by the corporation that owns it to steal data and inventions from other worlds. One wrinkle of the travel is that if you travel to a world where your doppelganger is alive, it’ll kill one or both of you. So Cara, who is for some reason dead in almost every other universe, is an invaluable employee. But Cara has her own secrets, which implicate even darker things than just the underlying corruption of a corporate oligarchy.
A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray
Marguerite’s parents created the Firebird, an invention that allows people to jump into multiple universe. But then her father is murdered by, shockingly, his assistant Paul, who escapes into another universe before he can be caught by the police. Unwilling to give up on bringing Paul to justice, Marguerite pursues him through the multiverse, meeting alternate versions of people she knows…and discovering the motivations behind and cause of her father’s death might not be as clear cut as they seem.
See you, space pirates. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.