Parallelities
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 First edition cover |
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| Author | Alan Dean Foster |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Bruce Jensen |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Del Rey Books |
| Released | March 1995 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 320 pp (first edition, paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-345-48358-8 (first edition, paperback) |
Parallelities is a darkly humorous 1995 science fiction novel by Alan Dean Foster. The story depicts Max Parker, a slimy Los Angeles tabloid reporter sent to interview a rich man, Barrington Boles, who claims to have invented a machine that can break through the barrier between parallel universes, dubbed "paras" in this novel.
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[edit] Plot summary
Max first assumes the man is a typical loonie, but then the machine not only works, but has a side effect that not even Boles anticipated: it "zaps" the reporter (the scientific nature of what happens is never explained), inflicting him with a condition that randomly and without warning draws people and objects from parallel worlds into his own, and that eventually causes him to drift randomly into other parallel worlds. Many of these worlds are so similar to his own that he can scarcely tell the difference. They contain even the same people, including other versions of himself. But subtle differences do abound, and they include his inability to find a version of Boles who knows how to stop the process! Max appears to have no control over the process himself, and his only hope of ever returning to his original world is that the process will eventually stop on its own. But the worlds that he's being plunged into are getting weirder and weirder (often resembling the types of stories Max used to write about), soon threatening his sense of individual identity and belief in a stable existence.
[edit] Characters
- Max Parker – a Los Angeles tabloid newspaper reporter, protagonist
- Barrington Boles – a rich inventor
[edit] Allusions/references to other works
One of the worlds that Max visits is directly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
[edit] Release details
- 1995, USA, Del Rey Books ISBN 0-345-48358-8, Pub date ? March 1995, paperback (First edition)
- 1998, USA, Del Rey Books ISBN 0-345-42461-1, Pub date ? September 1998, paperback
- 1998, USA, Del Rey Books ISBN 0-345-38373-7, Pub date ? December 1998, hardback
