Overview
Many Earths: A Novel
Where one woman comes face-to-face with who she might have been
What If Another You Existed?
About Many Earths
Engineer Fiona Ly’s carefully ordered world is collapsing. Her aunt—the woman who raised her—is presumed dead. Her neighbor has been murdered. Her brother sits in jail for a crime she knows he didn’t commit. And now, when her reflection moves half a second too late on her computer monitor, she’s afraid she’s finally losing her mind.
Then she meets another version of herself—one who chose poetry over circuits, balance over ambition—slipping between realities with technology that shouldn’t exist. Watching this other self move through the world with a grace she’s lost, Fiona begins to wonder: what if she made all the wrong choices?
As corporate conspiracies close in and her parallel self offers escape to a better world—one where Fiona’s mistakes were never made—she faces an impossible decision. Flee to perfection, or stay and protect a broken world that’s still hers to defend.
Many Earths is a literary speculative thriller about identity, responsibility, and the courage it takes to live with the life you’ve made—even when another one is calling.
Read an Excerpt
1
Friday, November 12, 2004 — 11 PM
Preparing for a third rerun, Fiona leans forward to adjust the waveform parameters—and sees her reflection move half a second late. Heart hammering, she lifts a hand. This time, the reflection moves with her. No delay. She exhales, trying to file the anomaly away—the way she’s filed Aunt Millie’s absence, her deferred poetry, every other thing that doesn’t fit neatly into logic. Data points without patterns can be ignored.
Can be ignored.
Must be ignored.
But this one clings. The reflection. The delay. After thirty-six hours with barely any sleep, her mind keeps slipping—back to the dream she didn’t mean to remember during the nap she didn’t mean to take. She refuses to call it a nightmare, though it was: her own body lying askew beneath a trimmed hedge, a knife protruding from her parka, the cup of coffee offered with comforting intent—only to reveal blood beneath the lid.
She shakes it off. Friday already. Eight weeks before tape-out, and the chip won’t finish itself. She refocuses, but the monitor now flashes Internal Error in angry red letters. Hours of work—gone.
“You okay?” Evan asks, hovering at her cubicle door, rumpled in yesterday’s conference polo and still wearing his badge lanyard.
Xuan Ba Nguyen 