I am not sure when I first encountered In Other Worlds, the second book in A. A. Attanasio’s Radix tetrad. For years, though, I’ve been carrying this scene in my head — a nebbish hero who begins to spark with energy, eventually exploding into light leaving an melted image of an expression of total joy burned into his bathroom mirror. He awakes in a strange world, 130 billion years in the future, as an idealized version of himself.
I didn’t remember any more than that. I lost his books when I lost my house in California, along with most everything that wouldn’t fit into a small apartment I shared with two kids and two cats. Since then, I’ve haunted used book stores with no luck finding anything by him. My local library does have some of his books, but not that one, and none of his complete series.
I recently found In Other Worlds electronically and read it, voraciously.
Carl Schirmer had other plans for his life, but found himself managing a bar that was being drunk to death by its owner and her daughter, a girl Carl can’t bring himself to talk to, though he feels she might like him. Still, the bar is doing well, and who knows? Maybe someday he’ll ask the girl out…
One day, he feels great, smells like a mountain spring, is covered with static electricity and is shorting out any electricity-using object near him. That night, he’s brushing his teeth when he is converted to light and vanishes. The police call it spontaneous human combustion.
The truth is weirder.
Carl Schirmer regains consciousness embedded in a lake-sized gelatinous creature called an “eld skyle”, who informs him that they are in a bubble of space-time embedded inside the event horizon of the ultimate black hole at the end of the universe, 130 billion years in Carl’s future. Light comes from the afterimages of decayed matter. There is no solid ground; islands large and small hover within paths of twisting gravity. The remnants of humanity still exist, pulled likewise from the far past, kept as sources of food for fourth dimensional predators.
He can never return home. Until he can.
In Other Worlds is a book that just really does not quit. Each page brings something new and weird. The story strains at the strictures of a book you might expect, but Attanasio can’t help making you stop for a moment so he can blow your mind just a little more.
In Other Worlds isn’t really connected directly to Radix. They don’t share characters or settings. All four books in the tetrad try to answer the question, “What’s next? And what’s next after that? And then?”
If you happen to see In Other Worlds somewhere, give it a shot.
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