Book review: The Long Mars

Terry Pratchett's final novel has been published, but I'm still a couple of books behind, including the series he co-wrote with Stephen Baxter. To be honest I've never felt that Pratchett had a huge amount of input into the actual writing of the Long Earth novels - I know the idea of parallel worlds that could easily be visited was his, so that could be the only reason his name remains on the books. It makes sense that with Pratchett's failing health while the series was being written, Baxter would do most of the heavy lifting, and there's never been much hint of Pratchett's style in them - either in terms of humour or of story. Instead the books seem primarily concerned with creating a universe based on the initial conceit, rather than having particularly involved stories take place in it. So as the name suggests, the third book The Long Mars expands that further to include a trip across the various versions of Mars. But these don't run parallel to the Long Earth, instead stretching out into yet another different series of alternate universes. As usual there's also various storylines going on across the Earths as well, including the rise of a possible new evolution of humans. With the series nearly over I might as well continue to the end (although I guess Baxter could keep going on his own, in which case I'll bail out) but this sweeping look across the whole of a new universe doesn't really leave much room for the kind of story development I was hoping for.

Book review: The Long War

The second book in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's Long Earth series that takes place over a multitude of parallel universes is The Long War. It's a bit of a deliberate misnomer as an all-out war in the "stepwise" Earths proves to be impossible, but there's a lot of tensions, some to do with the US government's schizophrenic approach to how hands-on it wants to be with the alternate Americas; as well as issues with how to deal with the life forms found in the alternate Earths. I did think after the lengthy setup of The Long Earth that for the next book we'd get something a bit more focused, but this is still a bit of a rambling story taking place over multiple dimensions with various casts of characters, and it never quite got me gripped. I also can't quite buy the central conceit that, within a couple of decades of discovering how to "step," humanity would already be skimming over Earths millions of steps away in each direction, without actually having properly explored the ones nearest to the Datum. The book's enjoyable enough all in all, but doesn't quite get going as much as I expected the sequence to have done two books in.

Book review: The Long Earth

Terry Pratchett only seems to have got more prolific in recent years; The Long Earth, which he co-writes with Stephen Baxter, is the first in a planned new fantasy series that plays on the ever-popular theme of parallel universes. But where quantum theory sees every decision spin off into a different reality, so that infinite universes exist with tiny differences, The Long Earth is a multiverse where our Earth - here called the Datum Earth - is the only one that's inhabited, by humans at least. And the multiple other Earths stretch out to a notional East and West. A few years into the future, blueprints for a mysterious device are posted on the internet, and the result is a "Stepper," a machine that allows people to move along by one Earth at a time. Faced with a seemingly infinite number of fresh new planets just as the original one's resources are starting to run out, humanity's instinct is to colonise.

The main thrust of the novel follows Joshua, a young man born between worlds who's acquired a natural affinity for stepping as a result, and his journey with Lobsang, a disembodied entity who claims to be a reincarnated Tibetan, but may in fact be a computer program that's become sentient. They travel West through the Long Earth, partly to research the different realities but partly to be the first to travel millions of steps away from the Datum. There's a few plotlines running through their journey but largely this is a scene-setting novel that builds up the writers' fictional universe, and given how little hard plot it has I found it very entertaining. Beyond things like the design of the Stepper device (it requires a potato to work) there's little of the comic side of Pratchett, but instead there's an interesting central relationship between the loner Joshua and the rather smugly omnipotent Lobsang.