The Universe Next Door: A Journey Through 57 Alternative Realities, Parallel Worlds and Possible Futures
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You are here. But what if you weren't? You could easily have ended up in a different reality...
Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
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Fourteen masters of speculative fiction, including two graphic storytellers, from Appalachia,...
anthology short stories
All Our Wrong Todays
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Elan Mastai's acclaimed debut novel is a story of friendship and family, of unexpected journeys and...
Time-travel Love story Alternate universes
TacoDave (3640 KP) rated Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) in Movies
May 7, 2022
I'll say this: Sam Raimi used to be one of my favorite directors, but with this movie he has officially turned me off the Marvel universe. It is nonsense.
Example A: dreams are actually real events happening in alternate universes, so if you dream about showing up naked to work, a version of you really did that.
Example B: reading the book of evil allows a witch or sorcerer to "dream walk" and inhabit the body of an alternate version of themselves. It never explains how this works, but apparently you can "aim" your dream-self because Doctor Strange is able to intentionally dream walk into a dead body and use it. He can't move between universes, but somehow he can do this.
Example C: the city of Kamar-Taj is destroyed and everyone killed except for Wong and Strange. Yet in the last scene the city is full of warriors practicing. Where did they come from?
Example D: Cool cameos! Mr. Fantastic! Professor X! But they all die. Every single one.
Example E: Wanda's whole motivation is to go to a different universe to be with her kids. But why not go to a universe where Vision is still alive? Wouldn't that be her goal? NEVER EXPLAINED.
It doesn't stop there, but that's a good sampling of how nonsensical the plot is. Nothing is explained, nothing make sense, and rules are made up out of whole cloth. Doctor Strange as a zombie? Sure. How? We don't know.
I'll never watch this again and might not watch future Marvel movies, especially considering you have to watch WandaVision on Disney+ to fully understand this movie.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
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He's spent the better part of a decade navel-gazing, spying on 39 different versions of himself in...
Ten Thousand Skies Above You
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Margeurite Caine has done the impossible, traveling to alternate dimensions with the Firebird - the...
Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human
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Medieval authors placed fantastic creatures in the borders of manuscripts, since they mark the...
Leanne Crabtree (480 KP) rated Obscura Burning in Books
Jan 12, 2021
I love the cover of this. It's very sci-fi-y and drew my attention straight away before I even read the synopsis.
So I found this to be a bit confusing with the continuous switching between realities and it took me a while to get used to it, especially keeping up with how all the other characters interacted with Kyle between the two realities he was living. In one people are alive who should have been dead, in the other he was friends with a girl who treated him like crap in the former. Another strange fact is that while he's in one alternate universe, he continues to function in the other, so he zips back and forth and can be in the middle of doing something that he then doesn't remember starting.
The girl I just mentioned above, Mya, tries to help Kyle figure out what's happening by taking him to a scientist/professor who did a paper on multiverses. In the "Danny's dead" world, I really like her, she's friendly and fun, while in "Shira's dead" world, well, she's not. (I think I got that right...)
As for Danny and Shira, I don't think I was a fan of them from the start. I'm not sure why, maybe it was because we never really saw enough of them, or the them before the fire that injured/killed them. But by the end, I definitely didn't like them.
The writing style was easy to get into and I kinda devoured the book when I finally just sat back and let myself read it without any distractions.
Don't be put off with it having a gay relationship in it, there's nothing overtly graphic between Danny and Kyle, just references, it doesn't go into great detail. It doesn't go into detail with Kyle's female relationships either.
This was probably a little too sci-fi for me; alternate universes? Erm...not really my thing but I did enjoy it. If you like sci-fi and mystery then you'll probably like this.