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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Vangie's Ghosts is a science fiction fantasy novel by Paul Di Filippo that deals with the idea of infinite multiverses, parallel universes, in each of which life goes on like ours but in an altered form, where the events or time are slightly staggered. It explores the possibilities if they are accessible for us, manipulating which we can perform what we may call magic and even experience something close to immortality. The idea has a lot of scope, which the writer gleefully exploits and exhibits to us, taking us through the nooks and corners of his multiverse saga.
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