Alternative Dimensions

About this book

Alternative Dimensions is the fourth book in this shared hard-science-fiction timeline, and the inside-view companion to Alternative Worlds. Where the earlier book tells the outward life of Eleanor Anne Maxwell across three centuries-the bomb, the three bridges of longevity, the crossing into the substrate, and the long voyage outward from Earth-this one tells the same life from within, and carries it a fourth century further, all the way to the genie's world. It is the story of the dreams that were not dreams. Across her whole enormous life, Eleanor dreamed of a vast blue figure rising over a heavy red world beneath a blue-white sun-a being who could casually conjure forests, cities, and whole turning worlds. She learned, far too late, that the dream was a true flash forward down the long harmonics of the membrane that lies between the worlds, to the Jathuun of Alphecca: the genie-civilization whose heavy world had been the true destination of her four-hundred-year journey all along.