Her Voice is a Backwards Record by Ozy Brennan

[wolffyluna]

I have a book to recommend! Her Voice is a Backwards Record, the best novella based on a philosophy paper I've read.

If all physically possible universes exist, so do all physically possible girlfriends… including the one you're imagining who's imagining you.

Ana's parents, who hadn't heard that it wasn't game-theoretically optimal to punish her for dropping LSD, packed her away to a troubled teen camp. During the day, Ana faces the harsh Utah desert, near-starvation, and torture in the name of "therapy." At night, she seeks desperate comfort in the arms of her alternate-universe girlfriend, Yuya, one of three hundred wives in the harem of the Emperor of Every World. But as their respective prisons wear away at their very selves, both girls face a choice: to become the monsters those in authority want them to be, or to die trying to escape.

Caveats:

• I do personally know the author and helped beta this. I wouldn't recommend something I didn't like just because someone I knew wrote it, but I will admit to being biased
• there is torture and institutional abuse in this one. It's Heavy.
• on a lighter note, Ana and Yuya do have explicit multiversarial sex while 17, so that's a heads up for that if you want it.

Comments

[lb_lee]

This looks like it might be up our alley and might fit the bill for pluralstories, but I can't seem to find a sample to read from the Smashwords page, even though I know they usually have them! Am I just not seeing it somehow?

[wolffyluna]

This is the author's first time publishing on Smashwords, so they might have accidentally not included one? I can get in touch with them if you would like? There is a free sample on Amazon, if that works for you: link .

I'd say it is potentially pluralstories material. "Is Yuya an increasingly specific set from an infinite set of Yuyas in an infinite multiverse, or is she an 'ordinary' headmate with an origin with more theoretical physics than usual?" is not a question that can be answered without answering if this story is set in Tegmark II multiverse, which the story does not answer.