The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

[unspeakablehorror]

Just finished The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, and this has become one of my favorite stories. Though I will warn that the subject matter touches on some more commonly  triggering material such as domestic violence, physical and emotional abuse, and assault.

It's a scifi story about an Earth where travelling to parallel universes is possible, and there's a huge demand for the information and resources that can be collected this way.  The protagonist, Cara, is a traverser, someone who walks between worlds.  Only similar worlds can be traversed, of which there are a limited number.  And only a select group of people can traverse most of these worlds, because in order to do so, a person has to have already died on that world.  The type of person most likely to have such a dearth of alternate selves in these similar worlds is the type who was born with the deck of life stacked against them. People who are poor, had neglectful or abusive parents, who have people out to kill them, who were likely to develop serious health problems.  And few people have had the deck stacked against them as much as Cara has.

Of the three hundred-some worlds that are known, Cara has died in all but eight of them.

I really love the premise of this story--the idea of parallel universes holds a special appeal to me.  I wouldn't consider this a hard scifi story, though it does throw in the occassional real scientific reference.  There's just not much emphasis or focus on the details of how interdimensional travel fit into current scientific theories.  Still, I also don't think the purpose of this story is to explain how travelling to parallel universes would work, but rather to use parallel universes to explore the idea of 'what if', and this is something I think it does particularly well.

This is a story about the deeply personal, even as it puts society as a whole under a microscope.  It's full of action, high stakes, complex characters(and their multiple iterations), and a few surprising twists.