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 has survived a decade as the only woman in the room by learning exactly what to suppress: grief, anger, and the poetry she once loved. Precision has kept her safe.
Then her neighbor is murdered, her brother arrested for the crime, and the pharmaceutical conspiracy she uncovers reaches into her own company — all the way back to a Stanford laboratory, a faked death, and research someone has been killing to contain. She does what she knows: observe, hypothesize, test, iterate. She is very good at this. She has had to be.
But her reflection has started moving half a second late.
The woman who appears is her — same face, same scar, same history — except she kept the poetry. She didn’t subtract herself to survive. She slips between realities with technology that shouldn’t exist, watching with the patience of someone who has been waiting a long time to be let back in. She is not a threat. She is not a stranger. She is everything Fiona set aside, returned.
Many Earths is a literary speculative thriller about a woman who fractured herself to endure — and what it costs, across universes, to become whole.
Read an Excerpt
1
Friday, November 12, 2004 – 10:00 PM
Preparing for a third rerun, Fiona leans forward to adjust the waveform parameters—and sees her reflection move half a second late. Her pulse spikes. She lifts a hand. This time, the reflection moves with her. No delay. But the wrongness lingers—not in the glass now, but somewhere behind her eyes, a faint misalignment that makes her hold still a moment longer than she means to, aware of the low fluorescent hum, the flat wash of the screen’s light, how the glow drains the color from her hands, leaving them almost gray against the keyboard. That half-second gap, like arriving late to her own life.
The protocol is the same as always. She files away what doesn’t fit—Aunt Millie’s absence, the occasional echo of her voice in an otherwise empty room, the abandoned poetry, the way her breath catches when she thinks of the lines she no longer finishes. Data points without patterns are noise. But this one clings. After thirty-six hours on 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, rain-slicked and still, a cup of coffee offered in comfort, the lid giving way, and beneath it, blood, dark against the paper. The image persists. She has to push it away herself this time.
Friday already. Eight weeks before tape-out, and the chip won’t finish itself. She refocuses, but the monitor now flashes INTERNAL ERROR in hard red. Hours of work—gone.
“Damn it.”
“You okay?” Evan asks, hovering at her cubicle door, rumpled in yesterday’s conference polo and still wearing his badge lanyard.
“Just peachy.” She gestures at the screen.
Xuan Ba Nguyen 