Introduction
Science fiction isn’t just a literature of ideas. Any good writer follows the consequences of those ideas, asking the next question, and the next, and the next. The five stories in this sequence all center on “Alternitech,” a company that sends prospectors into alternate, similar timelines in order to exploit the differences. Imagine the small fluctuations in your day, how a few inches or a few miles-per-hour during a skid on an icy road could make the difference between a fender-bender and a fatal accident. Tiny changes like this could lead to a world where the Beatles never broke up, or where Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t gunned down after the Kennedy assassination, where an accidental medical breakthrough offers an unexpected cure to a rare disease.
But a story isn’t “about” that. It’s about how those changes affect the people who witness them.
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