Frederik Pohl’s The Coming of the Quantum Cats is a seminal work of multiverse fiction that shows its age, and its prescience at the same time.
Dominic “Nicky” DeSota has a good life as a mortgage broker. He drives primly at 38 mph, just below the speed limit on the highway. He respects the Arab community and their partnership with the Republicans controlling America. When you swear on a Bible, you swear on the Koran, too, at the same time.
But then the FBI, led by Nyla Christophe, comes to have a chat with Nicky, and not because he took his top off at the pool, either. Turns out they have questions about his whereabouts. Impossibly, someone who looks like Nicky and has the same fingerprints as Nicky broke into a research lab while Nicky was hundreds of miles away in New York City. Soon we are introduced to other DeSotas, other versions of Nicky, from other timelines. Another Nicky is a Senator. Yet another a General in a world with a cold war ready to go hot. And there are versions of other people too. The FBI agent from Nicky’s timeline is a soldier in another, and in still another, a violinist. And it becomes even more clear that all of these alternates, and all of this interdimensional travel, could have very serious consequences—for the entire multiverse.
This is the story of The Coming of the Quantum Cats.
The Coming of the Quantum Cats was my first Frederik Pohl novel back in the day. I remember seeing the book in Waldenbooks in the mall, looking at the cover, reading the back cover, and buying it immediately. At this point, I had already long since read Roger Zelazny’s Amber books, and was consuming any multiverse fiction that I could grab. This book fit that bill and I read it in less than a day, and have re-read it several times since, but it has been a while since I’ve tackled the book. With the multiverse now ubiquitous in our popular culture, I thought it was worth a revisit.
The format of the book is alternating points of view between various DeSotas, and various Nylas (whose last name varies) as well. In the front of each of the chapters after the first couple are interstitials which have nothing to do with the main plot, but they show the consequences and effects of what is happening are reaching out to other timelines, other worlds, ones that we don’t need to see, but just get a brief sense of what is happening. The other timelines, the ones we actually visit or have main characters from, all cluster from divergence points around 70 or 80 years from the present of the book (which is roughly when the book came out, in the 1980s). So none of these timelines are so wild as to have things like the Roman Empire ruling the world, but they are all close enough that having versions of Nicky and Nyla is plausible.
A lot of what movies like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” explain and explicate for the audience on screen is here, first, in Coming of the Quantum Cats. In print science fiction, the multiverse was not new by any means in the mid 1980’s, Amber and Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels, or Keith Laumer’s Worlds of the Imperium, to name three. But aside from one bit in one of the Laumer books, few of the multiverse books or stories before Coming of the Quantum Cats really work all of the implications of having duplicates of yourself. Niven gets there in a compact form with “All the Myriad Ways”, but Pohl decides to make that argument at novel length, instead.
Pohl’s thesis, in this book, is that people are a mixture of nature AND nurture. The relatively retiring Nicky DeSota IS the same person as the hardbitten general, or the philandering Senator, and when push comes to shove, they can transcend their natures, or their upbringing, as the case may be. Pohl does this cleverly with Nyla. The first Nyla we meet is the hard-edged FBI agent who is missing her thumbs thanks to a previous crime. She really clashes and compares strikingly with other Nylas, particularly Nyla the violinist (the Nyla the soldier gets a lot less play unfortunately). Nick even brings up the thesis of the book to Nyla the agent, that with other circumstances, she could have been something very different than what she was…and still *can* be. Neither biology nor nurture are absolute destiny. That’s a message that resonates as much today as it did in the 1980s.
Among other trivia, this is the first time I encountered Stephen Hawking as a person in any format. He had not yet broken into the mainstream of popular consciousness and this was before his A Brief History of Time. He shows up in a cameo—actually several versions of him, one of whom is *not* suffering from ALS. I did wonder “who is that?” and soon after came across mentions of him in things like Scientific American, which a high school teacher encouraged and pointed at me to read. The book is full of little details like that, things that “if you know, you know”. For example, in one of the aforementioned interstitials, there is mention of, in one of the timelines, a sudden and unexpected flooding rain hitting New York city and its suburbs, mentioning Queens and Richmond Counties as “suburbs”. If you know your NYC geography, you can see that in that world, Queens and Staten Island (whose county name is Richmond) are not actually part of NYC in that universe. The book has lots of hidden gems for the reader to discover.
The ending of the book, I had not remembered as well as I thought, and it’s rather chilling and apocalyptic. It absolutely makes sense given the premise of the book, and the fact that it is our original beaten-down Nicky DeSota that figures it out once again goes back to the thesis. For all the genius and power of the various other DeSotas, it’s the original mortgage broker Nicky who puts together the true apocalyptic implications of the multiversal technology. In the end, Pohl closes his thesis rather convincingly, that, despite his upbringing and history, Nicky DeSota can be the cleverest of all of them. (There is also a redemption arc for Nyla, although that is somewhat less convincingly rendered).
Overall, if you want to read a classic of Multiversal fiction, you might want to pick this up from the library and give it a go.. Sadly, no cheap ebook version of this exists, and used copies can be expensive.
