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- Arcadia
Horror & ghost stories, Science fiction
Shortlisted for the James Triptree Award, this literary science-fiction novel by award-winning author Lisa Tuttle is 'a brilliant exploration of the relationship between quantum mechanics, human choice and alternate worlds' The Oxford Times
Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, this literary science-fiction novel by award-winning author Lisa Tuttle is 'a brilliant exploration of the relationship between quantum mechanics, human choice and alternate worlds' The Oxford Times
Sometimes, those roads not taken can come back and haunt you.
Clare's unhappy life hasn't gone the way she expected. At the age of thirty-three she's still an accountant, still unmarried and ridden with guilt over the tragic death of her brother. Her obsession with roads not taken drives her into a nervous breakdown, until she comes to realise that she can leave her unsatisfactory "real life" behind and enter alternate realities where things worked out better.
But when she explores these other existences, she discovers they are far from the perfect lives she was imagining, and wherever she turns, another Clare usurps her own existence, until she is forced into the ultimate confrontation with madness - and truth . . .
Praise for Lost Futures
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Lisa Tuttle is good - very good. Lost Futures is genuine SF, and deserves to win not just the Clarke award but the Hugo and Nebula as well . . . There is sound scientific speculation at the heart of the story, we care about the characters, and the narrative pulls you along like a runaway train . . . I love this book. - New Scientist
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Lisa Tuttle is an author whose work skirts very close to horror. ... Her writing always has a taut, clear, compelling quality. ... This is not a book to read if you are depressed, not a light read at all, but it is a book I'm glad to have read. - Jo Walton
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Lost Futures captures the dislocations, fears, and staggering possibilities of our times in a way that is so intense, so compelling, so emotionally real, that the effect is mind-altering. It has not stopped haunting me since I read it. - Lewis Shiner
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Lisa Tuttle's best fiction is like a slow settling of vast planes of thought and emotion-luminous, quiet, wry, and often bitter. .. This is a fine psychological novel with a very focussed, internal point of view. It's difficult to put down . . . Lost Futures is not, in the final analysis, horror. It is a book about growth and transcendence, and a very good one at that. - The New York Review of Science Fiction
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Lost Futures is a brilliant exploration of the relationship between quantum mechanics, human choice and alternate worlds and is an outstanding success not just as a novel of ideas but as a moving portrait of a woman under stress: it is the best serious science fiction published this year. - The Oxford Times
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This book is a multiverse riff, strongly reminiscent of The Female Man and Woman on the Edge of Time, but the device is used for a personal, not a political story. It's mildly yet pervasively eerie and disorienting. - Judges for the James Tiptree, Jr Award
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Lisa Tuttle is one of the all-time best because she writes not only some of the scariest stuff around, but also the most meaningful. This one will get you where you live. - Pat Cadigan
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Lost Futures is a controlled and powerful work which is one of the finest things Lisa Tuttle has ever written. - Paul Kincaid, Vector 168
Lisa Tuttle
Lisa Tuttle was born and raised in Austin, Texas, but moved to Britain in the 1980s. Her first novel, Windhaven, co-written with George R.R. Martin, was followed by a dozen fantasy, science fiction and horror adult and YA novels, and hundreds of award-winning short stories, collected in several volumes. She now lives with her writer husband and their daughter on the side of a Scottish loch.
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