''The World Next Door'' is a 1990 science fiction novel by

Brad Ferguson Bradley Michael Ferguson (born 1953) is a journalist and science fiction writer.Clute, John.Ferguson, Brad" (entry in ''The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction''. He writes as Brad Ferguson. Life Ferguson is married to scientist Kathi Ferguson, with ...

, combining in a novel way the subgenres of

alternate history Alternate history (also alternative history, althist, AH) is a genre of speculative fiction of stories in which one or more historical events occur and are resolved differently than in real life. As conjecture based upon historical fact, altern ...

and of predicting the Third World War. It was first published in paperback by

Tor Books Tor Books is the primary imprint of Tor Publishing Group (previously Tom Doherty Associates), a publishing company based in New York City. It primarily publishes science fiction and fantasy titles, and is the largest publisher of Chinese scien ...

in October 1990. The book is an expansion of a short story of the same name published in '' Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine'' in September 1987.

Plot

The story takes place in 1997, at two interlinked alternate realities. In one of them, the

Cuban Missile Crisis The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis (of 1962) ( es, Crisis de Octubre) in Cuba, the Caribbean Crisis () in Russia, or the Missile Scare, was a 35-day (16 October – 20 November 1962) confrontation between the United S ...

had escalated into a major nuclear exchange. What was left of the United States disintegrated into numerous virtually-independent enclaves, though President

John F. Kennedy John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK and the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination i ...

may still be alive in a bunker somewhere. Most of the plot centers on

Lake Placid, New York Lake Placid is a village in the Adirondack Mountains in Essex County, New York, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 2,303. The village of Lake Placid is near the center of the town of North Elba, southwest of Plattsburgh. ...

and along parts of Route 86, where an oasis of civilization was painstakingly built, threatened by a well-organized band of rapacious robbers who claim to be the

New York State New York, officially the State of New York, is a state in the Northeastern United States. It is often called New York State to distinguish it from its largest city, New York City. With a total area of , New York is the 27th-largest U.S. stat ...

National Guard. Meanwhile, the "world next door" which avoided nuclear war in 1962 is going to experience it thirty-five years later because

Soviet general secretary The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

Mikhail Gorbachev Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet politician who served as the 8th and final leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country's dissolution in 1991. He served a ...

reforms Reform ( lat, reformo) means the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc. The use of the word in this way emerges in the late 18th century and is believed to originate from Christopher Wyvill's Association movement ...

went wrong in the worst possible way. This war would be much worse than the one in 1962, because nuclear weapons have had decades to become even more highly destructive. Characters from the first ("1962 War") world keep experiencing in dreams the lives of their analogues in the world threatened now with war. At the end of the novel, many children from the second world are transported across and given refuge in the "1962 War"-world, where meanwhile the "National Guard" robbers had been dealt with rather ruthlessly. (The book's plot is constructed so as to lead the reader to condone the cold-blooded killing of unarmed prisoners, since otherwise the prisoners in question would have escaped and perpetrated terrible atrocities.)

Reception

In a review for ''Aboriginal Science Fiction,'' Janice M. Eisen described ''The World Next Door'' as having an "intriguing plot" but that the worldbuilding was confusing in places. By contrast, ''Science Fiction Chronicle'' reviewed the novel more positively, praising "the blend of melodrama and mysticism in the final chapters."

Notes

1990 science fiction novels American alternate history novels Novels set in New York (state) Works originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Novels about the Cuban Missile Crisis Fiction set in 1997 {{ColdWar-novel-stub