Crosstime Traffic

In the first half of his first collection of short stories, Watt-Evans comes up with some clever variations on a standard SF theme: imagine that you can travel from world to world among an infinite number of alternate realities, but with no way to return to where you started. Watt-Evans introduces us to a New York City cop whose job it is to deal with chunks of other universes--such as a 200-foot flying whale--periodically dropped onto Earth by ``reality storms''; a mourning widower who travels doggedly from universe to universe in a desperate attempt to resurrect his marriage; and an entrepreneur who has discovered a way to bring back marketable ideas from other worlds. Unfortunately, although the book promises ``an infinite number of possibilities'' for tales of travel between alternate realities, Watt-Evans ( The Misenchanted Sword ) seems to run out of ideas about midway through the collection. The result is an oddly disjointed book whose second half is composed of a few fantasies and some self-consciously old-fashioned stories about martians, monsters and a couple of space-colony kids who decide to build a spaceship. (Nov.)