I'm looking for a book I once owned.....

toby jenkins

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problem is, i can't remember what it was called or who it's by! it was a collection (all by the same author) which contained a story about a man who could "jump" from one reality to another: it started off with a California ruled by Mongols, went on to a weird interlude where it was set in San Francisco in an alternate reality which was dominated by Latin American religious ritual, and ended with him apparently getting back to his wife in his own time (although the twist was that "he" than came home from work, so there were two of them and he realised he was still not in his reality). personally i think this story was the basis of that rather clunky tv series "quantum leap" - whatever. for some reason i think it might have been by robert silverberg, but i've drawn a blank looking on the internet. can anyone out there help me track this down? i bought it in a second hand book shop in about 1972!! so it must be 60's, i guess. i'd be very grateful if anyone could help me track it down.

thanks for reading!
 
thank you all for trying.... the robert silverberg tip seems well worth following up. don't you hate it when people lose your books for you???:)
 
All right, I have one I've tried to track down. I read it in the Sixties. It involved a colony, now living on Mars, that conducted raids on Earth. It seems the women on Mars (formerly Earth dwellers in generations past) had become mostly sterile, and so the raids concentrated upon capturing suitable Earth women. I remember that the raiders used guns that projected a sort of sticky webbing, which disabled those entrapped. I'd love to re-read this book, if I can find out its title and author. Thanks!
 
How about "All These Earths" by F.M. Busby, from 1978? It's been a while since I read it, but the plot seems similar. A man is searching for a parallel world where his wife still lives, after she died in his own world.

P.S. Nevermind, I just saw that you were looking for a collection of short stories, not a novel. Sorry.
 
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Husker1911 is looking for Alan E Nourse’s Raiders From the Rings (1962). It is as described.

From back copy: “… he human race is divided into the Spacers and those who still remain on earth. There is a constant low-level war between the two groups, with the Spacers raiding earth for supplies and for women. The war turns hot in the book and three teenagers, one Spacer and two from Earth, must find a way to bring peace.”


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The only thing that Husker and the reviewer got wrong is that it's not the women becoming sterile; space radiation kills off the Y chromosome in men's sperm, so they can only father males.
 

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