Three Futures, No Refunds

THIS BOOK WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO EXIST. REALITY HAS ALREADY FILED A COMPLAINT.

You have read the multiverse sagas. The six-timeline ones. The ones with four warring factions, a very serious prophecy, and roughly nine hundred pages before anybody makes a joke.

Somewhere around book three, you began skimming.

This is not that book. Reality would like that clarified for the record.

Three Futures, No Refunds begins with a birth.

Specifically, an impossible one. The hospital classifies the resulting child as "a contradiction with blankets and a pillow." Within days, he teaches a bright red ball to duplicate itself sixty-four times and nearly ends civilisation before lunch. A committee is formed. Then several more. None of them help.

It only gets worse from there, which means considerably better.

Teenage and grown versions of the same child begin arriving through walls to argue about how he should be raised, while an exhausted, note-taking and deeply overworked cosmic bureaucrat Reality tries, and repeatedly fails, to keep the paperwork under control.

If Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett once made you laugh out loud on public transport and you have been waiting for someone to attempt it again, properly, this is that attempt.

For the record, this book also contains:

• Reality itself, filing Administrative Observations about a child it never authorised and can no longer legally disown.
• A six-year committee meeting convened to determine whether "unexpected outcomes" qualify as mistakes. (They do not reach a conclusion. They do produce several reports.)
• Three versions of one person attempting to parent themselves, with predictably mixed and occasionally moving results.
• A corporation that found a way to monetise the apocalypse, a Department of Unlikely Outcomes, and a treehouse that appears to be holding several lives at once.
• Eleanor, who the universe cannot seem to reshuffle away, no matter how hard it tries.
• An ending. It arrives quietly. It is earned.

Reality has already decided this happened. As the title suggests, there are no refunds.

Buy Three Futures, No Refunds today. The committee has reviewed the alternative and does not recommend it.