Breakaway Books

Authored by Ruben Reyes Jr.; Published July 2025; Science Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️

Have you wondered about the alternative lives you might have led in parallel universes? Perhaps you’ve wondered how the society around you might be different as well? To dive into those questions, consider Archives of Unknown Universes.

In Archive of Unknown Universes, Ana and Luis travel to Cuba in hopes of finding new material for Ana’s research into the revolution in El Salvador. Desperate for a lead, Ana gazes into the defractor, a tool that shows alternate universes, but her heart really wants to know: Will she and Luis last? In another of the many universes displayed, it is Luis’s cousin Domingo whom Ana loves, and the revolution appears to have gone very differently. But regardless of which universe Ana lives in, generational secrets and an imperfect revolution remain. 

My top recommendation for this book is not to listen to it as an audiobook—this is a mistake I made. As the narrative jumps continually back and forth between parallel universes, the audio made it unnecessarily difficult to keep track of what was happening where. But this book explores issues that I often think about when in a philosophical state of mind: What small decisions have I made that had an outsized impact on my life? How would my own small life be affected if the larger geopolitical context turned out differently? Of course I know my life is affected by the system of government in my country, by who is elected and who is not, but I wonder if the effects might not be exactly what I imagine. I admit that I was confused at the questions the characters hoped to answer with the defractor. Why would they think it would provide leads for research or answers for whether their lives would take a certain path? The whole point is that the different universes are different, even radically so.

As with many novels, though, this book gave me an education. I was aware of the desaparecidos in Latin American history, but only in the most superficial of ways, and Ana and Luis taught me much more. The dreams and the paranoia of the Salvadoran revolutionaries are evident from the first page to the last. Interestingly, an odd side effect of introducing the concept of the defractor was that it left me somewhat in the dark as to which facts were true to life and which were mere figments of the author’s imagination. I’ll have to do research into El Salvador’s real history if I want to know the truth. Emotionally, there is one big and realistic truth here: These parents all want to hide the pain of their revolutionary past from their kids, and it’s driving their offspring crazy. This struck me as eminently realistic and all the more infuriating for it. Let this book be a reminder of the value of intergenerational openness.

Archive of Unknown Universes is a compelling thought experiment in a thrilling setting. It won’t allow you to escape, but it will make you think.