The World Next Door

"The World Next Door" is a 1990 novel by Brad Ferguson, combining in a novel way the sub-genres of Alternate history and of predicting the Third World War.

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 book takes place in the mid-1990s, at two interlinked alternate realities. In one of them, the Cuban Missile Crisis 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 is still alive in a bunker somewhere.

Most of the plot centers on Lake Placid, New York and along parts of route 86 where an oasis of civilization was painstakingly built, threatened by a well-organised band of rapacious robbers who claim to be the New York State National Guard.

Meanwhile, the "world next door" which avoided nuclear war in 1962 is going to experience it thirty years later because Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev reforms went wrong in the worst possible way. This war would be much worse than the one in 1962 because nuclear weapons had had thirty years more 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. In the end of the book (and pretty much the end of the second world) quite a few people 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.)