M. R. Carey’s Top Five Multiverse Stories

M. R. Carey is the author of the Pandominion duology (Infinity Gate and Echo of Worlds), a thrilling science fiction series set in the multiverse. Here he tells us about his top 5 books, films and TV series set in the multiverse . . .

My Top 5 multiverse stories

M. R. Carey

Nine Princes in Amber

Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels were the first multiverse stories I ever read, and I was hooked on them all the way through my mid-teens. Then I discovered Roger Zelazny’s Amber cycle and never looked back. The eponymous nine princes and their four equally high-born sisters have the power to walk between alternate realities – a power given to them by a pattern inscribed on the floor of a chamber in Amber’s royal palace. But when the pattern is stained with familial blood an army of monsters starts to advance through every reality, with Amber as their final goal. Crazy dimension-hopping ensues. Fast-paced, fun and endlessly surprising. And you’ll never look at the jack of diamonds the same way again.

The Space Between Worlds

This is a much more recent novel – Micaiah Johnson’s astonishing debut. The Space Between Worlds takes us to a future Earth devastated and depleted by climate breakdown but still pursuing the Capitalist business-as-usual. After discovering the secret of inter-dimensional travel, the business elite of Wiley City find a way to monetise it, mining alternate Earths for commercially sensitive information. There’s a snag, though: you can only travel to worlds in which your alternate self is already dead. Born in a war zone, the novel’s protagonist has a wider range than most – because in most realities she didn’t make it out of childhood. And now someone’s trying to murder her in her home reality too. Thrilling, poignant sci-fi with a hard core of urgent social commentary.

Bridge

Lauren Beukes is one of my favourite storytellers, not least because she never stands still. When she turned her hand to the multiverse in this 2022 novel she produced something amazing – a story about inter-dimensional travel that has huge and sweeping scope but remains intensely personal. A young woman grieving the loss of her mother accidentally gets entangled with her mother’s illicit research into alternate realities – and ends up searching across universes for the truth about her mother’s life and death. It’s a powerfully affecting story that’s also visceral sci-fi/horror.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

There’s no way I could leave this one out. The wonderful Michelle Yeoh teams up with Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu to deliver a wonderful meditation on life and love (not to mention what happens when you put everything on a bagel). This is a movie full of wit and charm, and for all the playfulness of its tone it lands its central themes about family and redemption with force and conviction.

Fringe

Fringe is a weird series about weird science. A lot of the early episodes are pretty much nonsense, although to be fair it’s nonsense with John Noble onboard so always worth watching. But once you’re past the first season, where it’s mostly trying to be the X-Files and failing, the show expands its scope and dives head-first into alternate realities. Specifically, alternate realities in which the central characters continually meet and struggle against darker versions of themselves. It’s daft as a brush, but still tons of fun.