Five sagas about alternate timelines and parallel universes

Charles Stross has won three Hugo Awards and been nominated twelve times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Novella, and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke and Nebula Awards. His latest book is Invisible Sun.

One of the author's five favorite sagas about alternate timelines and parallel universes, as shared at Tor.com:

The Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman

Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series (starting with the titular The Invisible Library, first published in the UK in 2014) mirrors [Roger Zelazny's] The Chronicles of Amber’s setting while using it for drastically different ends. There is Chaos (characterized by the malign and capricious Fae) and there is Order (oppressively maintained by Dragons), and the worlds between total chaos and total order exist in a spectrum of states. Holding itself apart from the endless cold war between the fae and the dragons is the Library, which exists outside of space and time: a liminal space curated by the Librarians, who harvest unique-throughout-the-multiverse works of fiction. Our protagonist Irene is a sensible lady in sensible shoes—the better for running with whatever book she has acquired (read: stolen) for the Library. She is assigned to a branch office in an unstable, chaos-adjacent steampunk London (there are airships, famous detectives, werewolves, and clockwork crocodiles), where it gradually becomes apparent that a struggle for control of the multiverse is under way and the Library is in danger of being sucked in. Great fun, and an example of the form updated for the present.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue