Science Fiction Alternate Universe

The sky is not the limit. From an alley in New York to an interstellar wormhole, the path to the future looks different for everyone. These cosmic short stories from some of today’s most influential Black authors reveal a universe of possibilities.

In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history, it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice.

Miriam Beckstein is a young, hip, business journalist in Boston. She discovered in The Family Trade and The Hidden Family that her family came from an alternate reality, that she was very well-connected, and that her family was too much like the mafia for comfort. She found herself caught in a family trap in The Clan Corporate and betrothed to a brain-damaged prince, and then all hell broke loose. Now, in The Merchants' War, Miriam has escaped to yet another world and remains in hiding from both the Clan and their opponents.

Dazzling, paranoid literary sci-fi for fans of Blake Crouch and Philip K. Dick: Vin, a down-on-his-luck young tech entrepreneur forced out of the software company he started, takes a job house-sitting an ultra-modern Seattle mansion whose owner has gone missing. There he discovers a secret basement lab with an array of computers and three large, smooth caskets. Inside one he finds a woman in a state of suspended animation. When Vin decides to climb into one of the caskets to see what happens, his reality begins to unravel....

Universe One created the technology to travel the multiverse long ago, closed their borders, and nobody knows why. The cultists have taken over HQ, and the Tuners are in hiding. While Jon and the team try to rebuild, they meet a mysterious bounty hunter with information that could help change the tide of the war. The answers they need are locked away in Universe One. Time is running short. The High Priest sends a message to the multiverse: convert or die.

Sixteen-year-old Winnie Schulde has always seen splits - the moment when two possible outcomes diverge, one in her universe and one in another. Multiverse theory, Winnie knows, is all too real, though she has never been anything but an observer of its implications - a secret she keeps hidden from just about everyone. But her physicist father, wrapped up in his research and made cruel by his grief after the loss of Winnie’s mother, believes that if he pushes her hard enough, she can choose one split over another and maybe, just maybe, change their future and their past.

The most brilliant mind in a thousand years has been tortured and twisted by human cruelty. His solution: Burn the world down and start from scratch. Almost no one can stop him. A single obstacle stands in his way. He must destroy the BrainTrust and its medical researcher extraordinaire, Dr. Dash. With millions dying, nuclear war in the offing, and the BrainTrust under siege, the fight for the very soul of humanity hinges on a last desperate question: Who remains to defy the darkness?

A City in Darkness - Four Lost Souls Seeking a Light - July 13, 1977 - The lives of four super-powered people become irrevocably intertwined when the lights go out in New York City, plunging their world into chaos. The superheroes of Just Cause, grown soft and complacent without any supervillains to challenge them, must overcome their personal demons as well as uphold the law in a lawless land of rioters, arson, and murder.

In the void between universes, a secretive organization called the Tuners works to maintain peace in the multiverse. The stability is threatened when a group of religious radicals seek to burn all those who do not believe. Jon Xiong, a 17-year-old from Montana, gets caught up in much bigger problems when the cult members appear at his home. The order wants him because he can distinguish the subtle differences of the cosmic background noise between universes.

When immortals start meddling with a century-old murder mystery, the King of the Eternal City summons Delphi Janjack: fixer, tour guide, gentleman’s gentleman...a one-person army meant to solve problems without mussing his top hat and brocaded vest. Delphi might also be a disgraced champion in hiding, his secrets so abhorrent nothing but death will wipe the slate clean. Nearly 400 years after the Elves invaded South America, there is just one free city left: Austen, Tejas. With the heir to Court Royale missing, the last bastion of human independence faces inevitable destruction.

As a new president takes the White House, Just Cause returns to New York City for the first time in eight years, under the command of its newest leader: Mustang Sally. But not everyone is excited about the expansion of Just Cause. Senator Christine Goodwin, slighted by the team's leadership years before, has made it her mission to put all para-humans on a very short leash while, at the same time, creating her own super-powered militia.

Seventh-grade Superheroes! It's not easy being a 12-year-old superhero, but the five kids of the neighborhood watch are doing the best they can. La Capitána: super-strong flier. Wheels: brilliant inventor. Hothead: catches on fire. Breezy: controls wind. Rascal: super-skateboarding. From their headquarters built into a repurposed Winnebago, they patrol the streets and alleys of their small hometown and dream of being big time heroes like Mustang Sally and the rest of Just Cause.

In exchange for the comfort of now, people gave up tomorrow. The builders of Tuners HQ aren’t what anybody expected. The conflict today was forged in the fires of yesterday. The Tuners have lost too much to the cult and are forced into a choice that divides the team. With the technology of Universe One on their side, they may find a way to end the reign of religious terror forever, but the cost is high.

Why wasn't Porsche Gain, Punk Cats bass player, charged in her almost unbelievable felony background? How did Blunderbusted, nautical rock band, raise the money to go from zero to hero without heading to prison? Why do Doctor Faraday, Oscar Shinsplint, and The Subhuman (the Electronica Triumvirate) claim that they don't have souls? Get the answers to these and many other questions in this rock and roll exposé.

Beginning the Star Force Phase 2 timeline, the Mak'to'ran serial details the defeated V'kit'no'sat fleet commander's days following the attack on Earth and the fallout within the Dinosaur empire that results from it. For as bad as the treason regarding the Humans and the bastardized Hadarak is, and the implications that one of the two founding V'kit'no'sat races are behind it, a much larger rift within the empire is being exposed that has the potential to do what neither the Zak'de'ron culling nor the Rit'ko'sor rebellion accomplished. A full Dinosaur civil war.

In a world where scientists have become the new superstars, Rick Hamilton, once a celebrated rock icon, has lost his passion for music amid the clamor of shallow fame. One night, in a haze of disillusionment, a portal from a parallel universe brings back his long-lost college roommate, Andy. The visitation offers Rick a chance to explore a reality where his life took a different turn.

Fans of Godzilla, Pacific Rim, and classic giant monster movies will enjoy this short story set in my story world Daikaiju Universe, where, on a planet Earth much like our own, horrific, ridiculously large, ambulatory forces of nature have been a periodic fact of life since the 19th century!