The title plays off of a decades-old murder mystery by Agatha Christie, but this Hugo-nominated novella is something quite new.
Sarah Pinsker (yes, the main character has the same name as the author. It doesn’t really play into the story as much as you’d think) has been invited to attend a convention. Specifically, an alternate-universe convention: SarahCon. The attendees, every one of them, will be…Sarah Pinsker. Dozens, hundreds of Sarah Pinskers, all from alternate universes that are more or less similar to each other, all gathered together at hotel on an island that’s safely closed off from the outside world for the weekend.
And then one of the Sarah Pinskers is murdered.
Victim: Sarah. Investigator: Sarah. Suspects: All variations on the theme…
I have to say, this is one heck of a creative way to do a character study. An entire convention attended by the same person, and we’re not just talking about versions of Sarah that are identical except for choice of haircut or t-shirt (although there’s quite a bit of that; registration on opening day is a nightmare).
There are Sarahs who chose a different job, or are dating a different woman. Sarahs who lived in a different city, decided to buy that horse they wanted when they were teenagers, or who were born ten years earlier when their parents decided they didn’t want to wait to have children. Some of the Sarahs aren’t even Sarah anymore, having transitioned to Josh or Joshua or Dare (which all the other Sarahs accept with a refreshing lack of drama). Their home universes can have tiny differences (favorite artists who had a much longer career instead of burning out early) or large ones (Seattle…isn’t there anymore in quite a few of them).
It’s a crazy situation, and the author has fun with how the different Sarahs interact, generally with a lot of humor to cover how unsettling it is to be in a room full of copies of yourself.
“You can put her drink on my tab,” said the me next to me. She wore her hair in a long braid down her back. I’d worn mine that way when I was thirteen.
I lifted my glass and toasted in her direction. “Thanks. Appreciated.”
“My pleasure. I’ve never bought myself a drink before.”
From the moment each Sarah meets a new one, the almost immediate focus is something called “the point of divergence”. The Sarah who narrates the story is as fascinated as everyone else seems to be with just how another Sarah came to the place where she is, instead of somewhere else. What one change would have made her choose a different college, a different career, to have the ambition to become a world-famous scientist instead of a fairly successful insurance investigator?
And what could make her kill someone? It’s a scary question, because if one version of herself is capable of murder, wouldn’t all of them be?
I’m still not sure what I think about the ending of the story. The murder mystery is solved, but I can’t decide if I was just confused by the similarity of all the suspects (sometimes designated with a number, other times by some random part of their appearance that the narrator noticed) to be able to follow the logic of the mystery, or if the author threw in too much last-second information for the reader to figure out whodunnit on their own.
And no one’s kidding themselves that solving the mystery actually solves the situation. The entire concept of alternate universes means the possibilities – both forwards and backwards in time – keep unfolding like a fractal snowflake, decisions creating more branches, creating more decisions creating more branches. Is it even possible to get an answer to the question “And then what happened?” when you’re dealing with all of that? And that doesn’t even take into account all the complications that come with humanity’s ability to lie to themselves, even when they’re staring themselves right in the face.
What I’m saying is that this is a fascinating study of identity and causality. Just don’t expect it to be tidy.
It’s worth noting that as far as I can tell this is the ONLY one of this year’s Hugo-nominated novellas that’s available for free online.