Title Resonance Series --- Author Chris Dolley Cover Art --- Publisher Baen First Printing Baen - 2005 Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters Graham Smith, Annalise Mercado Main Elements Alternate realities Website chris-dolley.com

Graham Smith is a 33 year-old office messenger. To the outside world he's an obsessive-compulsive mute - weird but harmless. But to Graham Smith, it's the world that's weird. And far from harmless. He sees things others can't . . . or won't. He knows that roads can change course, people disappear, office blocks migrate across town. All at night when no one's looking. The world's an unstable place, still growing, sloughing off layers of reality like dead skin. One day you drive by, and it's changed. Annalise Mercado hears voices, all from girls calling themselves Annalise. Sometimes she thinks they're spirit guides, sometimes she thinks she's crazy. But then they start telling her about Graham Smith and the men who want to kill him. That's when they meet. So begins the story of two people whose lives are fragmented across alternate realities. And how they hold the key to the future of a billion planets. . . .

This book was once available on the Baen Free Library. I started off not expecting much, the free books on Baen are sometimes free for a reason, but I had to admit it started off with an interesting character, Graham Smith. He comes of autistic, kind of reminiscent of Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon. We cringe as the people around him make fun of his social awkwardness and almost immediately we like him. However strange things happen around him, the world "unravels" whenever he isn't careful about doing the same thing every day (avoid stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, taking the exact number of steps, following the same ritual to unlock his door). Sometimes it's subtle, something he had gotten rid of shows up in his house, sometimes he finds he is still living in a house he moved away from a few years ago. But things start changing more rapidly and more significantly as the story progresses. He runs into Annalise who again, is a little different every time but can speak to a hundred other girls all called Annalise and they can share information with each other and with Graham. Together they try to figure out what is going on.

Could it be a virtual reality world with a glitch? Alternate worlds? Do they have some sort of connection to the afterlife? Parallel universes? I mean the blurb kind of gives it away but it was still a challenge keeping track of what was going on, what with only Graham being a constant across the various unravellings, the only one who would remember everything related to him. And of course, why him? He's nobody special but he does appear to be the only one that unravelling affects, what makes him different from everyone else, and well, the same as all the different versions of himself? And since the other characters are the same, but different, in every reality, even if you can trust them in one place, doesn't mean they have your interests at heart in another, or if they even exist in the first place!

And is he they key to saving the world, or is he doomed to be the thing that destroys it.

And interesting look at the theory of parallel universes and how they might affect each other and resonate across reality. In the end, I quite enjoyed this read.