What would you do if you found your perfect life?When lonely physicist Chloe Carsen discovers a parallel world she becomes addicted to her life there with a perfect family and a perfect career. She doesn’t even care that her physical body in the real world is wasting away. But, then, in the alternative world her ideal life begins to fall apart. Her anti-gravity experiment unleashes a government … government manhunt for her and her family; they’ll do anything to get their hands on her tech. The lives of Chloe’s alternative-world husband and sons are endangered.
Chloe is torn away from them as her real-world brother finds her on the verge of death and destroys her equipment. Heartbroken and torn between two worlds, Chloe pushes her scientific expertise to the limit to find a way to reconcile her two lives. Can the husband and sons be saved? Can she build a life for herself in the real world?
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Reality Alternatives is an immersive, deeply thoughtful science fiction adventure. It’s also a frightening examination of how technology can literally steal away our lives, and there’s a lesson in dark energy and dark matter that is so clearly described that I think I could now wing a cocktail conversation with a theoretical physicist. Well, maybe not, but at least I grasp the concept. That’s a testament to the way the author brings up a complex topic and makes it clearly understandable to a reader.
The adventure begins when physicist Chloe Carsen tests an experiment designed to determine if alternate realities exist, and if we can access them from our world. The experiment works, but in entirely unexpected ways. Chloe finds herself drawn into what seems like a perfect alternate self. The alternate Chloe is happily married, with a handsome husband and two terrific kids.
What happens to her body, left behind? What happens to her world as she increasingly wants to dream away her life in another reality? The story would be terrific as is, but the author throws a giant twist into the story as Chloe’s alternate self discovers that she can manipulate dark energy. Her entire family is put at risk as she struggles to contain and understand this new ability, one that manifests very much like a superpower.
In the meantime, there’s the ticking clock of Chloe’s real body, trapped in a dream state as she struggles to save her alternate family. The story doesn’t let up and the twists and turns are relentless as the story races to the climax. The ending is surprising and satisfying at the same time. I couldn’t put it down, and I’ve found that I keep thinking about it long after I finished it. I highly recommend this novel.
I quite liked this one – I recently read and reviewed Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (I actually read it concurrently with this title), and was insanely excited to have not one but TWO multiverse books going at the same time… I am fascinated by the quantum theory concept of multiple branching, parallel universes that arise out of our choices (or decisions not to choose). Reality Alternatives puts a novel take on this construct, using virtual reality as a gateway to (at least one of) these other universes. I liked this idea; it gave the story a fresh angle with which to come at the concept, while simultaneously addressing the often ignored problem of what happens to the you that is physically here when your consciousness branches out into another universe and puts you in another you’s body… (Incidentally, Crouch addressed this problem in an altogether different – and Crouch-ly realistic yet horrifying – way. It was fascinating to see the same basic theory handled in such distinctly original fashions in the two books – a bit of parallel universe-ing of its own!)
The basic premise – what our lives would look like if we had made different choices – is not a new one, and not one that is unique to the quantum multiverse concept. But the tech spin of quantum theory makes the standard “what if” idea just that much more interesting because it allows the author to actually play out the choices without relying on tropes like dreams or imagination. When Professor Chloe Carsen’s grant proposal actually works, no one is more surprised than she – and when it not only works, but gives her a life so radically different than her own that she literally cannot leave it, well, that’s when things get interesting…
The vast majority of the book is Chloe’s alterna-life, which is fine – it’s a unique and strange one, with odd goings on, and a lovely cast of characters. It would have been nice to get more contrast with a little more back-and-forth between her “real” life and her VR-induced one. Learning about the highs and lows of the path-not-taken is, after all, more dramatic when there is a thorough explanation of each path and its consequences. Also, it rather starts to stretch the bounds of credibility when she immerses herself so totally that she literally threatens her “original” life – even though an explanation is given for how this is possible, it is still hard to believe she could pull it off. Still, that aside, the two lives are strikingly different – for more reasons than the obvious, although I can’t mention why without a spoiler – and as a reader I had no trouble comparing them on my own. Had Smith done a more extensive job of that, she may have been unable to avoid explicit or implicit value judgments; this may be one reason she did not. As it is, the reader gets to interpret Chloe’s decisions – all of them – and that is a satisfyingly complex job in its own right.
Lesley Smith has created a credible scientific explanation for traveling between worlds – one I thoroughly enjoyed. I hope she has plans for more such creations – this was a fun, engaging, smart story and I look forward to reading more from her!
My review copy was provided by NetGalley.