Okay, so Monday morning isn't quite the weekend, but the newsletter's going out... I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, if you're in the US, and a good weekend, if you're not.

"A World of Difference" is another attempt I made to meld science fiction with an incest plot and I personally feel it's my most successful attempt. Enough so that I wanted to also write a non-incest version, that ultimately became "Into Another World" (Newsletter #19).

Part of the inspiration for this book's plot came from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love", in which the main character, Lazarus Long, is cloned, but with the twist that his Y chromosome is replaced by an X that is a composite of multiple of his descendants (rather than repeating his own X), producing identical twin girls who are as close to being his own identical twins as can be and still have them female. As the book is very incest-tolerant because reproductive health has advanced to the point that there's no longer a genetic risk, he does have sex with both once they're old enough. The book treats the girls as both his sisters and his daughters.

What I wondered one day was whether I could duplicate that effect of having male/female identical twins, but without needing the direct genetic manipulation. The idea I came up with was to use parallel universes, where the event which caused the split between the universes was the conception of one child. Same egg but different sperm, resulting in a male in one universe and a female in the other. Stephen and Stephanie. Then have a portal between the worlds to let them meet. I did add some more plot to boost their common DNA to about 88% (it would otherwise be about 75%), but that part's a surprise. It doesn't get them as close as Lazarus' sisters (about 99%), but not bad for my purposes.

Besides their bedroom hijinks, the story also explores how their lives were different because of their genders and how that has impacted the people around them, from family to friends. Toss in a little politics around the public revelation of the parallel world portal and you have a story.

Before you ask, the same portals (and the organization that runs them) are also in "Into Another World", but otherwise the plots are quite different. You could refer to the stories as taking place in a "shared multiverse", but can be read separately. I have made their covers similar to reflect this, if you look closely.