It's incredible how a sci-fi story published over 70 years ago stands up. I would be lying if I wasn't hoping for more of a twist or a twang at the end.

It's giving Final Destination meets The Lake House.

The reading I listened to on YouTube by Vintage Sci-fi Audiobooks was brilliant. ( )

Murray Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins) is one of the great names in early Science Fiction, but he also tried his hand at westerns and mysteries, eventually writing hundreds of radio scripts and more than a dozen movie screenplays. He goes so far back that a few of his great stories, such as The Runaway Skyscraper, didn’t even appear in the pulp magazines — because they hadn’t yet been invented!

The Other Now is a later story from the great Leinster, first appearing in Galaxy Magazine in 1951. It’s less that twenty pages, but it will absolutely blow you away. It’s enthralling from the first sentence, and once you realize what may be happening, it’s even more compelling. You have to remember that it wasn’t until 1952 in Dublin that Erwin Schrödinger joked with an audience that his Nobel equations actually were describing alternative realities happening simultaneously. And it wasn’t until 1957 that American Hugh Everett III put forth what would become known as the many worlds theory. Leinster had, of course, dealt with similar themes much earlier, in Sidewise, but here, it was right on the cutting edge of quantum physics.

Jimmy and Jane Patterson loved each other very much, and then tragedy struck, and she was taken from him. Three months later, still lamenting the tragedy, he comes home and something strange happens. Didn’t he already open the door, and shut the door? Finally, he takes a photo, and it shows two doors. But it isn’t until he finds Jane’s diary, and is shocked to discover an entry dated after her death, and the sorrow filled within the entry as she laments his death in the car accident, that he begins to believe.

He tells his friend Haynes, an attorney, what has been happening. Haynes feels for Jimmy, but believes his friend may be going mad — at first. To reveal more would ruin this wonderful experience. Anyone with a romantic bone in their body will love this story, as will anyone who loves the genre, or just a well-written and enthralling short story. I consider this a minor masterpiece. It might seem too sentimental for the harsh world in which we find ourselves trapped nowadays, making it all the more wonderful. Though I picked this up on Kindle, it is available for FREE on Gutenberg, and I highly recommend you rush - don't dawdle - over there as quickly as your fingertips can carry you and download it. You’ll never think of the next drop of rain in quite the same way. ( )