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Vangie’s Ghosts
- Author
- Paul Di Filippo
- Narrator
- Emily Lawrence
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 20 February 2024
- Run Time
- 9 hours 57 minutes
- Format
- x-book®
What to expect
Paul Di Filippo delivers a thrilling and thought-provoking adventure through the multiverse in Vangie’s Ghosts, a compelling science fiction novel about one girl with extraordinary powers.
Three-year-old Vangie is mute and unresponsive. She shows no interest in the people or world around her, much to the frustration of her callous adoptive parents. Little do they know, Vangie is otherwise occupied observing “ghosts”—an infinite number of versions of herself, in an infinite number of parallel universes.
When a tornado hits their trailer and Vangie is severely injured, she makes a desperate leap into another timeline where she survives the tornado, but her adoptive parents do not. So begins a life of shuttling through various foster homes, cultivating her abilities to seek out alternate timelines, and making jumps calculated to better her circumstances in order to avoid the exploitation of adults who seek to harness her powers for their own means.
Vangie never communicates with her avatars, until one day the “Council”—a group of Vangies—appear to her and warn her of an ominous, growing threat in the multiverse: a man they call the Massive. And thus begins an epic conflict, spanning millennia and worlds, in a brutal effort to control the fate of the multiverse.
Vangie’s Ghosts is Paul Di Filippo at the height of his imagination and versatility, filled with compelling characters who play captivating roles in a story where the stakes are nothing less than existence itself.
Critics Review
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“Vangie’s Ghosts is a startling thought experiment, worthy of the deepest thinkers in academe. Plus it’s a hoot and a gas with a jolt at the end—swept along by Di Filippo’s fecund, playful prose. Call him the James Joyce of SF. The multiverse will never be the same again.”
Rudy Rucker, author of the Ware Tetralogy
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“A dark, brilliantly realized extrapolation of the multiverse having its ever more various ways with human nature.”
William Gibson, New York Times bestselling author of The Peripheral and Neuromancer
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“A witty novel of the multiverse and its abundant possibilities…Packed with winks and nods to the work of other science fiction writers, this will be a treat for genre fans.”
Publishers Weekly
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“Vangie’s Ghosts is brilliant and utterly surprising. With the sure hand of a master storyteller, Paul Di Filippo handles many characters and many timelines with unmatched confidence. The result: a funny, whimsical, sometimes horrifying novel that has everything I love about well-conceived science fiction. Vangie’s Ghosts contains multitudes.”
Cadwell Turnbull, award-winning author of We Are the Crisis and No Gods, No Monsters
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“Fans of mind-bending, paradoxical time travel SF might think Vangie’s Ghosts is worth the jump.”
Booklist
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“An impressively entertaining, deeply compelling speculation on the multiverse and the boundless potential of the human mind…A haunting, affecting piece of speculative fiction, blending elements of sci-fi adventure and space opera, horror, existential inquiry, and a deep-seated affection for the genre’s legacy.”
Boing Boing
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Details
- Author
- Paul Di Filippo
- Narrator
- Emily Lawrence
- Duration
- 9 hours 57 minutes
- Release Date
- 20 February 2024
- ISBN
- 9781538404805
- Format
- x-book®
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Science fiction, Alternative history fiction, Science fiction: apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic, Generational sagas, Science fiction, Adventure fiction
Synopsis
Paul Di Filippo delivers a thrilling and thought-provoking adventure through the multiverse in Vangie’s Ghosts, a compelling science fiction novel about one girl with extraordinary powers.Three-year-old Vangie is mute and unresponsive. She shows no interest in the people or world around her, much to the frustration of her callous adoptive parents. Little do they know, Vangie is otherwise occupied observing “ghosts”—an infinite number of versions of herself, in an infinite number of parallel universes.When a tornado hits their trailer and Vangie is severely injured, she makes a desperate leap into another timeline where she survives the tornado, but her adoptive parents do not. So begins a life of shuttling through various foster homes, cultivating her abilities to seek out alternate timelines, and making jumps calculated to better her circumstances in order to avoid the exploitation of adults who seek to harness her powers for their own means.Vangie never communicates with her avatars, until one day the “Council”—a group of Vangies—appear to her and warn her of an ominous, growing threat in the multiverse: a man they call the Massive. And thus begins an epic conflict, spanning millennia and worlds, in a brutal effort to control the fate of the multiverse.Vangie’s Ghosts is Paul Di Filippo at the height of his imagination and versatility, filled with compelling characters who play captivating roles in a story where the stakes are nothing less than existence itself.
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