Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, by Ted Chiang

Published in Exhalation, Knopf, May 2019

Quantum computing has changed the world--by enabling people to communicate with other versions of themselves, on alternate timelines. This is done through devices called "prisms." Any given prism can only reach a timeline that split off after it was first activated.

Nat is a young woman with a somewhat troubled past, who is now drug-free, and working in what one might call a "prism cafe," where people who can't afford their own prisms can communicate with their "paraselves" on other timelines. This is a dying business model, because the price of prisms has come way, way down.

Her boss, Morrow, has worked out ways to make money anyway.

The big question is, though, does communicating with other timelines and seeing the results of other choices you might have made, help or hurt? 

The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark

Tor.com, ISBN 9781250294807, February 2019

Senior Agent Hamed al-Nasr, and his new partner, brand-new Agent Onsi, of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, are called in to investigate the haunting of a Cairo tram car.

This is, of course, not out Cairo. This is Cairo in the first part of the 20th century, and on a different timeline than ours. In 1879, a man bored through the wall separating our world from the world of the djinn, in the process weakening the wall between the worlds everywhere. Egypt was the first beneficiary, for good and ill, and European powers were driven out. Egypt became a constitutional monarchy. And like the UK, they have an active women's suffrage movement.

So back to the haunted tram car. They quickly determine that it's not a ghost causing the problem. That's no surprise. The Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities has never found any ghosts, no matter how much people believe they exist. It's something else, most likely some variety of djinn.