This series focuses on stories that are both enjoyable and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective. This week, let’s think about “home.”
One of the joys of watching Sliders as a kid was that you never knew how crazy the next universe would be. Even when I was little, I found a lot of them implausible, but that didn’t stop them from being interesting.
Passage, by Michael Milne and published in The Sockdolager, comes at the “stepping between universes” idea from a different perspective. When you bounce between infinite universes, some of which barely diverge from ours, how do you know when you’re home? I hadn’t really considered that question when I was little, but this story really hammers home how important it is to define “home” really freaking well before taking a jaunt through the multiverse.
It’s also an interesting examination of how such trips might change a person. When you’ve been to places that are identical matches to your home with the exception of a slight change in the spelling of an acquaintance’s name, how can you ever really be sure that you are home?