All the Myriad Ways

Publication date: 
1968-10
Publication type: 
Short Story
Published: 
Galaxy, October 1968
Opus No.: 
36
Setting: 
Time Travel/Parallel Universe
Characters: 
Gene Trimble
Summary: 

Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble faces an increasing number of bizarre suicides in a world struggling to come to terms with its place in a multiverse of different timelines, where every decision ever made by anyone becomes an alternate universe.

Notes: 

Niven's take on divergent timelines

Reprints: 

Anthology, Worlds of Maybe, edited by Robert Silverberg, 1970; graphic, Psycho, November 1972 (as "All The Ways and Means to Die"); Graphic adaptation with Howard Chaykin in Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #5, Marvel Comics, Sept. 1975, includes Niven interview; anthology, Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, with memoir, cloth and paper, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, Playboy Press, 1980; anthology, The Way It Wasn't, ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Carol Publishing Group/Citadel Twilight 1996; anthology, The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, ed. Harry Turtledove & Martin H. Greenberg, Ballantine Del Rey, 2001; All the Myriad Ways; N-Space; Best of Larry Niven, The; De Stranden Van Serius Vier