A Tale of Multi-Identity
Novel · Dial Press · 1970
William Keniston, a TV actor, looks out from his Greenwich Village apartment one evening and is struck by what he sees happen in an apartment across the street. A woman ties one end of a length of rope to her balcony railing and the other end around her waist, steps into her bathroom for a while, and then re-emerges. Keniston trains a pair of binoculars on her and is amazed to see himself in female form. His efforts to track her down land him in the multiverse, where he encounters parallel versions of himself, some of them monstrous.
Tom on Counterparts
To my knowledge, Counterparts was the first hardcover novel (perhaps the first novel, period) to be set in the multiverse. I used this word in the jacket copy, which Dial Press let me write, and for years assumed I’d coined it; in fact, physicists have been using the term since the early twentieth century. When it was published, sci-fi was still a ghetto genre. Hardcover sci-fi was a rarity.
