"Schrödinger's Kitten" is a 1988 novelette

Novelette

A novelette is a piece of short prose fiction. The distinction between a novelette and other literary forms is usually based upon word count, with a novelette being longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella...

 by George Alec Effinger

George Alec Effinger

George Alec Effinger was an American science fiction author, born in 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio.-Writing career:...

, which won both a Hugo Award

Hugo Award

The Hugo Awards are given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Awards...

 and a Nebula Award

Nebula Award

The Nebula Award is given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America , for the best science fiction/fantasy fiction published in the United States during the previous year...

, as well as the Japanese Seiun Award

Seiun Award

The is a Japanese science fiction award for the best science fiction published in Japan during the preceding year, as voted by attendees of the Japan Science Fiction Convention. "Seiun" is the Japanese word for "nebula", but the award is not related to the American Nebula Award. It was named after...

. It was later expanded into a novel, published in 1992 under the same name. It was originally published in Omni

Omni (magazine)

OMNI was a science and science fiction magazine published in the US and the UK. It contained articles on science fact and short works of science fiction...

.

The story utilizes a form of the many worlds hypothesis, and is named after the Schrödinger's cat

Schrödinger's cat

Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, usually described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The scenario presents a cat that might be...

 thought experiment

Thought experiment

A thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment considers some hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences...

. It first appeared in Omni

Omni (magazine)

OMNI was a science and science fiction magazine published in the US and the UK. It contained articles on science fact and short works of science fiction...

, and its original novelette form was also featured in the third volume of The New Hugo Winners

The New Hugo Winners

The New Hugo Winners was a series of books which collected science fiction and fantasy stories which had recently won a Hugo Award for Short Story, Novelette or Novella. It ran for four volumes, published in 1989, 1992, 1994, and 1997, together collecting stories that had won the award from 1983 to...

in 1994.
The story follows a Middle-Eastern woman, Jehan Fatima Ashûfi, through various realities, ranging from one in which she is raped when still a girl, subsequently abandoned by her family and dies alone, to one in which she is sentenced to death for killing her would-be rapist and being unable to pay the "blood price" to his family, and another in which she becomes a physicist and companion to well-known German scientists ranging from Heisenberg

Werner Heisenberg

Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory...

 to Schrödinger

Erwin Schrödinger

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist and theoretical biologist who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, and is famed for a number of important contributions to physics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933...

, and subsequently prevents the Nazis from developing nuclear weapons during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 by simply forwarding "unintelligible scientific papers" to key politicians looking into the idea.

She is, unusually, aware of the existence of these realities, which she perceives as "visions" and assumes might come to her from Allah

Allah

Allah is a word for God used in the context of Islam. In Arabic, the word means simply "God". It is used primarily by Muslims and Bahá'ís, and often, albeit not exclusively, used by Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic Christians, Maltese Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Mizrahi Jews and...

.