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Nathan Tavares (Titan Books)

IT SEEMS like the multiverse is everywhere right now, if you’ll pardon the pun. From its origins as a groundbreaking head-exploder of a scientific theory, it seems to have achieved the dubious honour of being the go-to lazy plot twist. But it can also elevate other potentially tired genres. This is the trick Nathan Tavares pulls off in A Fractured Infinity, using it to provide new facets for the humble coming-of-age novel.

If you tip the idea on its side and squint, what is the multiverse but the infinite sea of possible future selves that cast their inverted shadow over terrified teens and 20-somethings? Will you unlock your best self when you become an adult? Be dragged to hell by your worst? Or, even more horribly, end up stuck as some mediocrity between the two extremes?

This is how Tavares’s protagonist, Hayes Figueiredo, starts the story, dubbed “nondescript” by the leader of a secretive lab that recruits him, despite his unimpressive résumé, to work on a world-changing project. That is also when he first becomes aware of the existence of an alternate version of himself, a towering genius who seems to have unlocked inter-universe communication and whose extraordinary accomplishments cast our relatively uninspiring protagonist’s shortcomings into glaring relief.

That other Hayes is the “final draft”. When we are young, we are in constant battle against our imaginary “final draft”. It relentlessly wags its finger at us, alongside the well-meaning people in our lives who are trying to help us avoid becoming our own worst-case scenarios.

In some ways, this is the hardest part of being young, the one we forget as we age out of this roiling state of constant possibility, waveforms collapsing into the settled selves that, for better or worse, become a stable identity.

But, in fact, the “final draft” Hayes aims for isn’t the increasingly suspect mega-genius. The version he yearns to become is a good husband to the man he loves, a good citizen amplifying other people’s struggles; a person who doesn’t let other people down by being “a mess”. But that is hard.

From studies in behavioural economics, we already know that your future self is a stranger. It is why we don’t save for retirement or eat our allotted vegetables and all that dreadfully boring stuff.

It is only when that future self make itself a bit more keenly felt – with the aches and pains of impending middle age, or broken relationships you can no longer mend – that we stop treating that self like a person in a different universe. So it is with Hayes, who begins to internalise that his actions really have consequences.

The multiverse is a wonderful twist on these strands, tying them together into something that fizzes. A Fractured Infinity is populated by some of the best sci-fi has to offer: a sardonic best friend who is a robot in human drag; living deepfakes; a drowned future city whose streets are lit by passing bioluminescent jellyfish; a Native American state in a post-civil war de-United States. And that is just Hayes’s home universe (it gets weirder from there).

The multiverse trope here provides an easy, entertaining vehicle for very deep philosophical lessons about what it takes to grow up at any age. A Fractured Infinity will be a great choice for young people and will remind older readers why our earlier years are often so excruciating.