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Quantum Weirdness
Diverging Streams follows two young lovers who, after an accident, are separated and reunited twenty years later by another accident, leaving them with the ability to travel through time and dimensions. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I began working on this book over 30 years ago, and I really don’t remember any particular inspiration for it. At one point, in 2008, I gave up on it and published Chapters 2 and 3 as a stand-alone short story, but about 2010, I took it up again and finished it in 2015.
Your novel has some interesting characters with their own flaws, yet they are still likable. How do you go about creating characters for your story?
I know it sounds corny, but I listen to my characters and allow them to develop their own personalities. I like to compare it to those old Max Fleischer cartoons in which Betty Boop or Koko the Clown climbs out of the ink bottle onto the paper. And once the characters are fully developed, I let them write the story for me. I feel more like an observer than the creator.
The science inserted in the fiction, I felt, was well balanced. How did you manage to keep it grounded while still providing the fantastic edge science fiction stories usually provide?
I have long believed that time, like space, is three-dimensional, which I maintain offers the best explanation for quantum weirdness. The world I have created—the constantly dividing and diverging time streams, each with its own unique reality, follows necessarily from multidimensional time. Although the afterlife, as I have described it, is more speculative, it is perhaps more a case of probable than merely possible.
Will this novel be the start of a series, or are you working on a different story?
I have no interest in further pursuing this story. I have finished two more novels: Conniption Creek, a dark comedy in the tradition of Catch 22, and The Swing Time Soda Emporium, a coming-of-age story set in small-town America during the 1940s, which I hope to publish by late this year or early next.
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Consistent with the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, time—like space—is three-dimensional, with a nearly infinite number of constantly dividing and diverging time streams, each stream containing its own unique reality.
Diverging Streams
Diverging Streams is a work of literary science fiction that blends time travel, alternate realities, and deeply human moments. The novel follows Haskell Yngren across multiple timelines, weaving together pivotal events from adolescence, adulthood, and parallel versions of his life. What begins as a vivid, often humorous barroom incident expands into a meditation on chance, memory, desire, and the small decisions that quietly fracture a life into many possible paths.
Author Earl L Carlson writes with a confident, old-fashioned storyteller’s rhythm, the kind that is unafraid to linger. He pauses to philosophize, to explain, to wander off briefly and then return. The prose is rich but not showy. He trusts long scenes and detailed observation, especially when he is writing about adolescence, embarrassment, longing, and those fragile moments when everything feels charged and irreversible. Some passages are genuinely funny, others almost uncomfortably intimate, and that contrast feels intentional.
The story leans into digressions and omniscient commentary, sometimes stepping well outside the action to reflect on culture, sexuality, or human cruelty. Still, those same detours are also where the book’s personality lives. The speculative elements are never flashy. This is not a fast, gadget-driven science fiction novel. Instead, the genre functions as a framework for asking what might have happened if a single moment tilted another way. The alternate timelines feel less like puzzles to solve and more like emotional echoes.
I felt that Diverging Streams is best suited for readers who enjoy reflective, character-driven speculative fiction. If you like science fiction that behaves more like literary fiction, are curious about time but deeply invested in memory, desire, and consequence, this book will likely resonate. It rewards patience and a willingness to sit with discomfort, humor, and nostalgia all at once.
Pages: 172 | ASIN : B0FP5TSF7T
LITERARY TITAN 