Alex Brown Reviews Many Worlds, or the Simulacra by Cadwell Turnbull & Josh Eure, eds.
Many Worlds, or the Simulacra, Cadwell Turnbull & Josh Eure, eds. (Radix Media 978-1-73771-843-7, $24.95. 180pp, tp) June 2023.
Speculative anthologies often have a central theme with individual stories. Some of my favorite anthologies I got to cover for Locus in the last two years have taken this approach. Voodoonauts Presents: (Re)Living Mythology, edited by Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, H.D. Hunter, & LP Kindred, collected stories by members of Voodoonauts about Black diasporic experiences. Reclaim the Stars: 17 Tales Across Realms and Space, edited by Zoraida Córdova, has Latinx authors telling Latinx-centered stories in science fiction, fantasy, and everything in between.
Many Worlds, or the Simulacra takes a different tack, with all the authors playing in the same shared world with interconnecting stories, much like one of the best anthologies from 2022, The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, edited by Janelle Monáe, which contained five stories born from the science fictional world from Monáe’s 2018 album Dirty Computer. Many Worlds clocks in at 14. Both formats are great, but you don’t see the second version nearly as much, which made this anthology even more intriguing.
According to the Kickstarter for the anthology, the eleven authors of the stories herein formed a writers’ collective to engage in a “collaborative, world-building exercise” with “stories worked on by multiple writers, authors sharing conceits and using their stories to riff on themes established by others, and disparate short stories coming together as limbs of a shared multiverse.” Writing for this anthology wasn’t only collaborating on a shared world but also sharing profits and resources. In other words, writing as community. Do they pull it off? Yes. Pretty well, in fact.
If you read short speculative fiction regularly, you’ll recognize most of the authors collected here. I’d previously read stories from almost all of them, but it had been a while, so it felt like coming in fresh. Some readers like to jump around in anthologies, but this is one where you should really read everything in order. Don’t skip the introduction! Written by Cadwell Turnbull and titled “Notes on the Form of the Simulacra”, this piece ostensibly introduces the reader to the concept of the Simulacra and the ideas that will pop up in the other stories. It’s mostly comments and posts from users of an online forum, with some explanatory asides peppered in. Everything from the creative narrative style to the content tells you everything you need to know about this anthology. If you dig the introduction, you’ll be hooked through the rest.
Throughout the stories, we meet characters who are aware, at least to some extent, of the existence of other worlds. In Rebekah Bergman’s “A Skillful Imposter”, we meet a woman who believes her husband is not really her husband and must decide what to do about it, while in Theodore McCombs’s “The Phantom of the Marley Valley High Auditorium for the Performing Arts”, students vanish every spring like clockwork but no one is much inclined to do anything about it. Some jump between worlds, such as the narrator in Cadwell Turnbull’s “Shock of Birth”, who finds themself in a changed world and with a new body and struggles with reconciling the differences. Others, when confronted with the breadth and complexity of multiple realities, demand answers that don’t exist, like Mei from Josh Eure’s haunting “To the Deep”.
Many Worlds, or the Simulacra is a pleasure to read and look at. The cover is stunning and strange, just like the stories. The font pairings and even the way the text is arranged on the page were appealing. Most of all, I was thrilled to learn that the publisher, Radix Media, is proudly worker-owned and -operated. For a collection all about community and collaboration, a union shop is the ideal publisher.
There are a lot of speculative anthologies out there clamoring for your attention, but don’t let Many Worlds, or the Simulacra pass you by. It’s creatively compelling and strikingly original.
Alex Brown is a librarian, author, historian, and Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, young adult fiction, librarianship, and Black history.
This review and more like it in the July 2023 issue of Locus.
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