Union has come. The Community is now the largest nation in Europe; trains run there from as far afield as London and Prague. It is an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
So what is the reason for a huge terrorist outrage? Why do the Community and Europe meet in secret, exchanging hostages? And who are Les Coureurs des Bois?
Along with a motley crew of strays and mafiosi and sleeper agents, Rudi sets out to answer these questions – only to discover that the truth lies both closer to home and farther away than anyone could possibly imagine.
***
Both in Britain and abroad, so much has changed in the years since the release of Dave Hutchinson's Arthur C. Clarke Award nominated Europe in Autumn that the mind positively boggles. In 2014 I described its depiction of a Europe decimated by division "as plausible as it is novel," but I'll be damned if it isn't beginning to look visionary.
What shape the differences democracy has recently wrought will take is, as yet, anyone's guess. Everything's up for grabs, not least the ideals we hold nearest and dearest—just as they are in the world of the Fractured Europe sequence: a manic mosaic of "nations and polities and duchies and sanjaks and earldoms and principalities and communes." (p.12)
The situation was, if anything, even worse the further East you went. Beyond Rus—European Russia—and Sibir was a patchwork of republics and statelets and nations and kingdoms and khanates and 'stans which had been crushed out of existence by History, reconstituted, fragmented, reinvented, fragmented again, absorbed, reabsorbed and recreated." (p.43)
But that's not all—hell, that's not even the half of it—as readers of Europe at Midnight will recall. That "mad story about a family of wizards and a map" elaborated brilliantly on the existence of a place called the Community: an impossible plane of space modelled on idyllic little England. Next to no one knew about it till now, but having kept its distance for decades, the Community is finally making its presence felt by way of a revolutionary railway.
The Line is being laid all across the continent, connecting the Community to the real world in a real sense, and although most folks don't mind, there are, of course, those—now more than ever there are those—who want to keep the outsiders out, and are willing to do whatever it takes to make their isolationist case. To wit, Europe in Winter opens on an awful atrocity, as a train packed with passengers travelling along that mathemagical track is attacked.
You'd think the authorities would come a-running with such loss of life rife, but Europe is so splintered that no one of its gaggle of governments wants anything to do with it. Even the innumerable NGOs are steering out of fear, such that solving the problem, if it's going to be solved at all, falls, finally, to the Coureur and erstwhile cook Hutchinson introduced us to in Europe in Autumn.
In a future scarred by fracking and ecological collapse, Jenna Hoolman's world is dominated by illegal smartdog racing: greyhounds genetically modified with human DNA. When her young niece goes missing that world implodes.
Christy’s life is dominated by fear of her brother, a man she knows capable of monstrous acts and suspects of hiding even darker ones. Desperate to learn the truth she contacts Alex, who has his own demons to fight. Last but not least there's Maree, a young woman undertaking a journey that will change her world forever.
The Race weaves multiple together story threads and realities to take us on a gripping and spellbinding journey.
***
If I were to start this article by stating that The Race is the best debut of the year to date, I'd be telling the truth, to be sure, but I'd be lying to you, too—and that's as apt a tack as any I could take to introduce a review of a book as deceptive and self-reflexive as said.
You see, it might be that I was more moved by Nina Allan's first novel than by any other released in recent months—emotionally and, yes, intellectually—but The Race was not released in recent months, not really: NewCon Press published an earlier edition in 2014, which, even absent the substantial and supremely satisfying expansion Allan has added for Titan Books' new and indubitably improved take two, went on to be nominated for the BSFA's Best Novel Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Prize and the Kitschies' Red Tentacle. And although The Race is indeed Allan's first novel proper, it is, in a sense, a cycle of stories that share subjects and settings, not unlike several of the aforementioned author's earlier efforts, such as Stardust and The Silver Wind.
So it's not really a debut and it wasn't really released this year, which leaves just one of my first line's facts unfudged. Happily, The Race actually is amazing, and if you haven't read it already, don't let this second chance pass you by.
The Race is a book about longing, and belonging. It's a book about identity—how it's formed for us, and how we go on to fit it to ourselves or else ourselves to it. It's a book that teaches us the value of family; the damage those nearest and dearest to us can do, and the good things, too. It's a book that instructs us to take the measure of our previous experiences before moving fully into the future.
It's a book, for the first hundred pages and change, about Jenna Hoolman, who lives in a former gas town with what's left of her family; with her brother Del and his oddball daughter Lumey. Sapphire's glory days are long gone, alas. "It's what you might call an open secret that the entire economy of Sapphire as it is now is funded upon smartdog racing. Officially the sport is still illegal, but that's never stopped it from being huge." (p.11)
Smartdog racing is the practice of gambling on greyhounds that have been genetically engineered to have an lifelong link with their runners, which is what the men and women who train and care for these incredibly clever creatures are called. Some people believe they're mind readers, but not Jen's boyfriend Em:
"I think true telepathy—the kind you see in films—is probably a myth. But something approaching it, definitely. A kind of empathic sixth sense. The work that's been done with the smartdogs is just the start. All runners are natural empaths to an extent, we've known that for a long time. The implant is just a facilitator for their inborn talent. Children like Lumey though—children who don't need an implant at all to communicate—they're the next stage. A new race, almost. And yes [...] that would make her very valuable indeed." (pp.129-130)
Valuable enough to kidnap and hold to ransom, to truly devastating effect, not least because the only way Del knows how to raise the money to buy Lumey back from her captors is to wager a sizable sum on his smartdog, Limlasker, winning the Delawarr Triple. "What it came down to was this: Del was proposing to bet his daughter's life on a sodding dog race." (p.67) The race Allan's title refers to, right?
In a fractured Europe, new nations are springing up everywhere, some literally overnight.
For an intelligence officer like Jim, it’s a nightmare. Every week or so a friendly power spawns a new and unknown national entity which may or may not be friendly to England’s interests. It’s hard to keep on top of it all. But things are about to get worse for Jim.
A stabbing on a London bus pitches him into a world where his intelligence service is preparing for war with another universe, and a man has come who may hold the key to unlocking Europe’s most jealously-guarded secret...
***
A great many maps were made in Europe in the Middle Ages. Foremost among them were the Mappae Mundi: "maps of the world" meant not as navigational aids but to illustrate different principles—the earth's spherical shape, say, or its flora and fauna. Such scrolls represented repositories of medieval knowledge, but even the most definitive had their limits; here be lions and the like was oft-enscribed where the unknown roamed. The Ebstorfer Mappa Mundi, for instance, depicts a dragon to the east of Africa—also asps and basilisks, presumably because it was better to show something than nothing; better, according to that thought process, to invent the positively extraordinary than to admit the littlest deficiency.
In this day and age, we expect rather more from our maps than that. We demand that they are exact, in fact—detailed to the nearest nanometre at least! And perhaps they are. But you know what? I hope to God not. If we're to understand that modern maps are absolutely accurate, then there remains nothing about the world we do not know, and me... I love a bit of a mystery. Which might be why I loved Europe at Midnight. That and a hundred other reasons, even.
The second section of the sequence Dave Hutchinson kicked off with Europe in Autumn—an "awesome concoction of sci-fi and spies" which went on to be nominated for a whole hodgepodge of awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke—Europe at Midnight is damn near the definition of unpredictable. It doesn't pick up where its predecessor left off, with Rudi welcomed into another world; indeed, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the glorified postman who was our last protagonist. Instead, the story, told by two brand new narrators, starts in a strange country—one of the milieu's proliferation of pocket nations, maybe—called the Campus:
The Campus was made up of four hundred Schools, scattered over an area about two hundred miles across and surrounded by mountains. Opinions differed over whether we sat in the bottom of the caldera of an ancient supervolcano, which was a charming thought, or the crater of a colossal prehistoric meteor strike, but to be honest nobody was thinking very hard about those theories at the moment. (p.29)
Why? Because the Campus is under new management following the overthrow of the oppressive Old Board, which left a mountain of mass graves in its wake, and an impoverished population. Unfortunately, well-meaning as it may be, the New Board doesn't have the slightest clue what it's doing, and though he has his own array of failings, no one knows this better than Richard, or rather Rupert of Hentzau—The Prisoner of Zenda, anyone?—"the worst Professor of Intelligence the Campus had ever had." (p.19)
Said sorry state of affairs isn't on him, however:
Part of the problem was that we just couldn't trust the few members of the Intelligence Faculty who were left alive, so I'd had to rebuild it from scratch, mostly with people who immediately changed their minds when they discovered that intelligence work was less like a John Buchan novel and more like being a particularly nosy village postmaster. (p.19)
Poor Rupe clearly has his work cut out for him, but when he discovers the hastily-burned bodies of a host of human beings genetically engineered to have working wings and whatnot, he puts his other assorted responsibilities on pause to look into a sickening conspiracy which not a few folks from Science City are complicit in. Little does Rupe realise that his investigation will culminate in a catastrophe that could collapse the entire Campus...
Mordak isn't bad, as far as goblin kings go, but when someone, or something, starts pumping gold into the human kingdoms it puts his rule into serious jeopardy. Suddenly he's locked in an arms race with a species whose arms he once considered merely part of a calorie-controlled diet.
Helped by an elf with a background in journalism and a masters degree in being really pleased with herself, Mordak sets out to discover what on earth (if indeed, that's where he is) is going on. He knows that the truth is out there. If only he could remember where he put it.
***
Evil just isn't what it was.
Used to be, you could slaughter a dwarf and gnaw his gnarly bones all the way home without attracting any undesirable attention. Now? Not so much. It's a new world, you know? And it might just be that the new world needs a new breed of evil.
In The Good, the Bad and the Smug, Tom Holt—aka K. J. Parker—proposes exactly that as the premise of a satirical and sublimely self-aware fairytale that brings together the wit and the wickedness of the author's alter ego with the wordplay and the whimsy which have made the YouSpace series such a sweet treat so far.
Readers, meet Mordak: King of the Goblins, and winner of a special award at this year's Academy of Darkness do. The prize is just the icing on the (unfortunately metaphorical) cake; he's been turning a whole lot of heads of late. Why? Well:
It wasn't just Mordak's arbitrary and bewildering social reforms—universal free healthcare at rusty spike of delivery, for crying out loud—though those were intriguing enough to baffle even the shrewdest observers, frantically speculating about the twisted motives that underlay such a bizarre agenda. It was the goblin himself who'd caught the public imagination. Mordak had it; the indefinable blend of glamour, prestige, menace and charm that go to make a genuinely world-class villain. (p.3)
It isn't all he has to offer either, for Mordak is also the face of New Evil: a "caring and compassionate" (p.281) agenda he's in the middle of forcing down folks' throats when his eternal enemies—is there anything worse than people, really?—suddenly find themselves filthy rich. So filthy rich, in fact, that they could cause a proper problem for the goblins.
This is an obstacle Mordak simply must overcome if he's to have a chance of realising his reforms. To wit, together with Efluviel, an elf who'd do almost anything to get her job as a journalist back—a job Mordak can give her as easily as he took it away in the first place—the King strikes out on an unexpected journey in order to expose the source of all the goddamn gold the humans have gotten their grubby paws on.
The hatches we discovered on Per Ardua were only the beginning. Bizarre gateways of alien design that allowed us to step across light years, they opened up the galaxy to us. They took us elsewhere and elsewhen, into a universe of futures and pasts that we could barely have imagined. And we stumbled across a plan. A plan that stretched from the beginning of time to its end. A plan that needed us. Well, some of us. Now we have discovered just how small a part we play. It is time to change that.
***
Worlds and times collide in the concluding volume of the absorbing duology Proxima kicked off: "a story that encompasses everything that will be and everything that could have been," just as Ultima's flap copy claims, but fails, I'm afraid, to take in the little things—not least characters we care about—in much the same way as its intellectually thrilling yet emotionally ineffectual predecessor.
Ultima ultimately advances Stephen Baxter's ambitious origin-of-everything from the nearest star to Earth at the inception of existence to the end of time on the absolute farthest, but first, the fiction insists on exploring, at length, what the galaxy would look like in terms of technology if the Roman Empire hadn't fallen in the fifth century.
When we last accompanied Proxima's protagonist, Yuri Eden had just travelled through the portal he chanced upon at the pole of Per Ardua, which planet he and hundreds of other unfortunates had been given little choice but to colonise. The very fact of the Hatch changes everything, however; it is, after all, evidence of alien intelligence. But what do these beings want—whatever, wherever or whenever they may be?
Ultima opens on the other side of the Per Arduan portal with, rather than an answer, a deflection in a dead lanaguage—or, according to the ColU, "a lineal descendant of classical Latin anyhow." (p.21) The speaker of this strange tongue introduces himself as Quintus Fabius, centurion of the star vessel Malleus Jesu, and sets about doing what any good centurion would do: taking Yuri and his companion Stef Kalinski prisoner.
Rudi is a cook in a Krakow restaurant, but when his boss asks him to help a cousin escape from the country he's trapped in, a new career—part spy, part people-smuggler—begins.
Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation "Les Coureurs des Bois," Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line—a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-European railway line—goes wrong, he is arrested, beaten and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue.
With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him.
With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws, Rudi begins to realise that underneath his daily round of plot and counter plot, behind the conflicting territories, another entirely different reality might be pulling the strings...
***
Maps are a way of rationalising landscapes, but what kind of map can help us come to terms with a country that changes every day? With a world that defies definition?
Dave Hutchinson's vision of Europe in the near future is as plausible as it is novel. In the aftermath of catastrophic economic collapse and a flu pandemic which led to the death of many millions, the Union begins to splinter:
The Union had struggled into the twenty-first century and managed to survive in some style for a few more years of bitching and infighting and cronyism. Then it had spontaneously begun to throw off progressively smaller and crazier nation-states, like a sunburned holidaymaker shedding curls of skin.
Nobody really understood why this had happened. (p.27)
However unclear the reasons may be, "pocket nations" (p.27) now proliferate across the continent, each with its own borders and orders. Anything goes in some, whilst in others, next to nothing does. With more and more of these micro-countries appearing every year, a gap has opened in the market: there's a dire demand for people prepared to brave Europe's impossible topography in order to transport packages—or perhaps important persons—from state to state in spite of tight guidelines.
Some call the organisation which has sprung up to meet the needs of this new niche a company of "glorified postmen." (p.124) Others don't believe in them, even. But they exist, I insist, and they call themselves Coureurs.
This is the story of M. Francisco Fabrigas, philosopher, heretical physicist, and perhaps the greatest human explorer of all ages, who took a shipful of children on a frightening voyage through dimensions filled with deadly surprises, assisted by a teenaged Captain, a brave deaf boy, a cunning blind girl, and a sultry botanist, all the while pursued by the Pope of the universe and a well-dressed mesmerist.
Dark plots, cannibal cults, demonic creatures, madness, mayhem, murderous jungles, the birth of creation, the death of time, and a creature called the Sweety: all this and more waits beyond the veil of reality.
***
Sitting down to review Theatre of the Gods this morning, I tried four or five introductions on for size before settling on this artless admission. In one, I wondered about the worth of first impressions; in another, I took to task the formula so much contemporary science fiction follows. I attempted academia; I had a stab at something snappy.
Nothing seemed quite right.
Hours had passed before I realised my mistake, which is to say there is no right way to start discussing Matt Sudain's debut; no single question I could ask, or statement make, which would somehow inform all that follows... because Theatre of the Gods is like nothing else I have ever read.
Large parts of it are certainly reminiscent of novels by an array of other genre authors: I'd name Nick Harkaway, but also Adam Roberts, Ned Beauman, Felix J. Palma and K. J. Parker. At points, Suddain put me in mind of Mark Z. Danielewski, even. So no, it's not entirely original. Call it a composite, or literary patchwork, perhaps. Yet it's stitched together with such vision and ambition that it feels completely unique.
Theatre of the Gods is sure to confound its critics, and divide its readership equally: though some will love it, a number are entirely likely to loathe the thing. I'd sympathise with either reaction. To address the false starts we began with, I'll say it makes a fantastic first impression, after which it follows no formula I've ever heard of. It's very, very clever, and incredibly memorable.
That there's something different about this book is evident from the outset. The copyright page is laid out in the shape of a five-pointed star; a pentagram, presumably. A list of illustrations follow, alongside a puzzling note that they're missing from this edition — the only edition that exists, unless you include the original "hyper-dimensional text [which] would have featured [...] borders, miniatures and ornamental scrolling type typical of illuminated manuscripts of its time" (p.vi) in addition to this absent artwork.
Fore and aft of this metafictional madness, a publisher's note pre-empts a few words from the pen of the so-called author, a Mr. V. V. S. Volcannon. At length, Volcannon insists his only role was to record the confessions of M. Francisco Fabrigas, "explorer, philosopher, heretical physicist, mystic, transmariner, cosmic flâneur," (p.x) though another voice has already informed us that the chronicler in question was blacklisted and forced into exile following the first professed publication of Theatre of the Gods.
The novel's authorship is in question, then, such that it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Suddain is no more or less invented than Fabrigas and Volcannon. I go too far, perhaps, yet it's hard to imagine that Theatre of the Gods is anyone's debut; it's so astute and assured that the mind positively boggles.
That said, it's almost impenetrable. And it doesn't get a great deal easier from here:
"The story of M. Francisco Fabrigas and the Great Crossing is a strange and wonderful tale and I've done my best to present it as it was told to me by the old master. I have spent an ungodly amount of time fleshing out his confessions, following the path of the Necronaut and its crew of misfits, speaking to eyewitnesses, hunting down fragments of journals and news stories, checking and rechecking every detail, and compiling a meticulous account of this historic human voyage through the Omnicosmos. For what it's worth, I believe the old man really did undertake an expedition to the next universe, aided by a handsome deaf boy and beautiful and cunning blind girl. He failed, of course, and the children died horribly. But I hope you enjoy this story anyway. For as I said earlier, practically every word is true, others less so, and some, like these, are not true at all." (p.xiv)
I'm sorry, say what?
And as to plot... let's just not. Suffice it to say there's an awful lot. Tellingly, the author regularly interjects to offer sympathetic summaries of the story so far. This excerpt abbreviates the first 50 pages:
"Oh, I know, I know, I know, this is all hellishly confusing. A man arrives in a space-saucer and claims to have travelled from another universe — a universe identical to this one — except that he has already left to travel to the next universe. He is thrown into prison for cosmic heresy, later freed on a trumped-up exoneration based largely on a dream about a starfish and a giant clam. Ah! It is infinitely confounding. Black is up, left is white, and nothing is as it seems. I would not blame you in the slightest if you went off to read that lovely romance book your husband bought you for your name day: Captain A'Rod's Crimson Whip. [But] do hang tight. In time it all becomes clearer, I promise." (p.62)
To a certain extent, it does indeed. Nevertheless, Theatre of the Gods is an inescapably complex novel. The thread at its centre is straightforward enough — a mad scientist and his cadre of last-chance companions explore another universe in a repurposed pirate galleon — but layer upon layer of complication make it difficult to unpick. There are secondary perspectives aplenty; frequent flashes backwards, forwards and in various other directions as well. Additional enigmatic narratives arise whenever the core story threatens to come together.
Little wonder that readers are regularly reminded that "if at any time you feel afraid and need a moment to recover, you can turn to [...] your Little Page of Calmness," (pp.255-256) which has kittens and things.
Don't say I didn't warn you!
You must be wondering if all this is a touch too much. Well, far be it from me to answer a simple question simply. That would hardly be in the spirit of Theatre of the Gods, so instead I'll assert that it is... and it isn't. The infinite obstacles discussed above make this novel, as much as they may break it for some.
Your only choice is to swallow the whole thing, hook, line and sinker. If you can't do that, don't bother. If you can? Then Matt Sudain's your man.
In short, Theatre of the Gods is a mad bastard of a book, set to the tune of a raving loon. It's a steampunk space opera like no other. An antidote to the repetition common in contemporary science fiction which makes an unforgettable first impression, and the feeling that you're reading — nay, experiencing — something singular persists until the vast narrative's last flabbergasting gasp.
It says so much about Matt Sudain's daring debut that I still can't begin to tell you whether I loved it or loathed it. One or the other, though. Or, I suppose, a little of both. I won't, however, ever forget it... unless I can find a way to read it for the first time a second time. Ask me again then!
The possibilities are endless. Just be careful what you wish for...
1916: The Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong and the wind in the leaves. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of no-man's-land gone? For that matter, where has Percy gone?
2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Police officer Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive—some say mad, others allege dangerous—scientist who seems to have vanished. Sifting through the wreckage, Jansson find a curious gadget: a box containing some rudimentary wiring, a three-way switch, and... a potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way humankind views the world forever.
The first novel in an exciting new collaboration between Discworld creator Terry Pratchett and the acclaimed SF writer Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth transports readers to the ends of the earth—and far beyond. All it takes is a single step.
***
There is something to be said for accessible sf like The Long Earth.
Exactly what slips my mind at the moment, but I'm sure it's perfectly profound... unlike The Long Earth. In the main, this playful collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter is more interested in absurdities, such as the potato which powers the invention which changes everything, as per the elevator pitch.
Folks come to call this ungodly gizmo a Stepper: a simple name for a simple bit of kit. It's a box which, in addition to the aforementioned power supply, contains some wires and a switch — and that's it! Anyone can make one. Almost everyone does. And when they do, they disappear.
But only from our Earth, because beyond the initial panic, Steppers don't seem to be dangerous. Perhaps the prominence of potatoes in the tech spec gave the game away? In any event, all they do is transport their users into a parallel universe — or rather, one of an apparent infinity of planets like yet in the very same second utterly unlike our own.
This, of course, is the answer to many people's prayers:
"That was the main thing about the Long Earth. [...] It offered room. It offered you a place to escape — a place to run, endlessly as far as anybody knew. All over the world there was a trickle of people just walking away, with no plan, no preparation, just walking off into the green." (p.55)
Not everyone is so freed by this pivotal discovery, however. You see, amongst the majority who can and do investigate the worlds notionally to the East and West of what becomes known as Datum Earth, even if only to carve out a second garden, or pan for gold - a currency which soon loses its value entirely - amongst this majority, then, there exists a disenfranchised minority "who can't step at all. They resent the Long Earth, and those who travel it, and all that this great opening-up has brought." (p.233)
One can only imagine we'll hear more from these people in subsequent volumes of this promising series-to-be, because their presence is only felt towards the cataclysmic conclusion of The Long Earth. That goes for Madison County police officer Monica Jansson too, whom the blurb paints as a protagonist, when it fact she's a recurring character at best.
His only companion on this fantastic voyage is Lobsang, an ostensibly artificial intelligence that the courts have famously declared human. He, or else it, is funny and friendly: an invaluable aid to both the reader and the read — though Joshua has a hard time figuring out where he stands with regards to this synthetic person, and so, equally, do we.
Thus, the larger part of The Long Earth involves Joshua and Lobsang getting to grips with one another, as beneath them a vast tapestry of alternate Earths scroll past. Worlds that could have been; worlds that would have been, if this or that climate crisis or asteroid impact had happened differently; worlds, perhaps, that should have been. However, as one fellow pilgrim so memorably puts it, whilst "rattling along in [their] great big penis in the sky," (p.243) they take precious little in; they learn almost nothing new, except about themselves.
This is certainly the biggest issue with Pratchett and Baxter's book, for though at the outset we experience the Long Earth from a variety of incidental perspectives, these recede into the middle distance the moment the Mark Twain sets sail. Thereafter the reader is so removed from it all that this fantastic voyage feels oddly... normal. Once the initial wonder of The Long Earth wears off, I'm afraid there's not much more to it than a robot and a boy trading barbs in a ship in the sky.
Not until the Earth-shattering last act, that is, when Pratchett and Baxter double down on their deeply appealing premise, revealing - not before time - the infinite possibilities of The Long Earth as a setting and indeed a series. I won't give the game away, except to say that there's no going back now — and how!
On the whole, The Long Earth is a little more frivolous than I might have liked, and the middle section sags to the point of distraction, but thanks to Baxter the science in solid, and overall the fiction is fantastic fun — that'll be Pratchett. Whatever their respective roles, between the pair of them they get it together when it matters most: the beginning is brilliant, and the end - a cliff-hanger of course - is epic. Considering the mind-boggling possibilities of a milieu wherein "the next world is [but] the thickness of a thought away," (p.123) The Long Earth stands as a measured success: initially exciting, ultimately awesome, and eminently accessible to any and all comers, be you a fan of one co-author or the other. Or both.
Or even neither.
***
The Long Earth
by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
UK Publication: June 2012, Doubleday
US Publication: June 2012, Harper
There is not one you. There are many yous. There is not one world. There are many worlds. Ours is one of billions of parallel earths.
When Everett Singh's scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer. Suddenly, this teenager has become the owner of the most valuable object in the multiverse — the Infundibulum — the map of all the parallel earths, and there are dark forces in the Ten Known Worlds who will stop at nothing to get it. They've got power, authority, and the might of ten planets — some of them more technologically advanced than our Earth — at their fingertips. He's got wits, intelligence, and a knack for Indian cooking.
To keep the Infundibulum safe, Everett must trick his way through the Heisenberg Gate his dad helped build and go on the run in a parallel Earth. But to rescue his Dad from Charlotte Villiers and the sinister Order, this Planesrunner's going to need friends. Friends like Captain Anastasia Sixsmyth, her adopted daughter Sen, and the crew of the airship Everness.
Can they rescue Everett's father and get the Infundibulum to safety? The game is afoot!
***
"The multiverse, on your iPad." Can you imagine?
Luckily for the multiverse, Everett Singh out of Hackney can.
The young son of a brilliant theoretical physicist, a fine cook and a prize goalkeeper to boot, at the outset of Planesrunner Everett, momentarily helpless, sees his father Tejendra spirited away against his will in a long, dark car by long, dark men dressed in long, dark coats. The police are promptly called out, but they don't seem to take Everett's statement seriously, and when, days later, they return the blurry pictures he took of the incident - doctored so as to obscure any and all details that might aid an inquiry they seem oddly intent on arsing up - Everett realises that he's going to have to save Tejendra himself.
For all intents and purposes, however, his father has vanished without a trace. As the official investigation dead-ends into infinity, Everett's only clue is a file left anonymously on his drop box: it's called Infundibulum, and our little London lad realises Tejendra must have left it to him... him and only him. But what does it do?
Better to wonder what it doesn't do. The Infundibulum is thirty gigabytes of abstruse mathematics that even Everett has a hard time parsing. But thanks to his genius dad and his hacker DNA, he can, and he finds "a map to anywhere and everywhere. And it's much more than a map, it's a phonebook." A phonebook pre-loaded with the contact details for all the worlds in the Plenitude. Tejendra has only gone and discovered the existence of innumerable parallel universes!
And now Everett, following in his father's footsteps, is in possession of "the most important artefact in the multiverse," the selfsame program that he can only assume led to Tejendra's kidnapping. Someone wants the Infundibulum rather badly, Everett realises, but he isn't just going to hand it over to the people who kidnapped his dad. Somehow, he's going to figure out how to use it himself, to travel to another London... and another after that, and another, until in one - or another - his finds his father.
"It was a terrible plan, apart from all the others. But it was working. Little by little, clue by clue, it was working. It looked a lot more reasonable than taking the Ring to Mount Doom. Everett giggled. This was his very own dark tower."
And just think: the fun has hardly even begun.
From the get-go it's engaging, exciting — practically unputdownable. It begins with the rush of Tejendra's kidnapping, ends on an even greater high, and in the interim the pace rarely flags, as we travel with Everett to E3 in search of his father, a needle in a haystack full of needles with directions to other haystacks full of needles. There's not a dull moment as we hop around E3 on his canny coattails, from action scene to staggering set-piece and back just to start again from scratch.
It's a shame that McDonald doesn't give us the guided tour of a couple of other Londons than ours and theirs, which is all that Planesrunner entails, but the world of E3 is a winner in its own right: an eerily silent cityscape wherein humanity discovered electricity before coming to depend as we do on fossil fuels.
"It was quiet. So quiet. Gone was the permanent internal-combustion growl of Everett's London, the shriek of brakes and the gasp of airbrakes. Here things hummed and purred on rubber-tyred wheels. [...] Electricity courses along the nerves of this London, through every city of this world, as the veins of Everett's home city were clogged with petroleum."
So E3 is a silent place, but not by any stretch a still city. Nor is it short of things with which to astound and amaze. There are pirates and airships and jump-guns and a sort of "United Nations for parallel universes," all rendered with such clarity that one begins to see pictures in place of McDonald's prose. Imagine the world of Chris Wooding's Tales of the Ketty Jay embellished with sparkling SF tech and an exquisite electropunk aesthetic; even then you're only coming close to the experience of E3.
In terms of character, too, Planesrunner impresses. Though he rarely puts a foot wrong, making this rather a linear narrative, admittedly, Everett isn't some superhuman saviour... just a geeky genius with tablet computer, some sweet software and a life-or-death impetus to make the right choices when crunch-time comes, as it does in every other chapter. In E3 Everett takes up with Sen Sixsmyth, the idiosyncratic daughter of the captain of the good ship Everness, pride of Hackney Great Port and the Airish. She is "a charmed child, a street saint," and though one immediately senses in her a love interest for Everett, thankfully McDonald is in no hurry to pair off his protagonists. Instead, Sen is in her free-wheeling element, leading Everett into and out of trouble with the Airish and the authorities alike. All heart and attitude and hard-won wisdom, Sen makes for an excellent counterpoint to Everett, who is contrast seems obvious, and methodical.
Planesrunner is but book one of Everness, and sometimes, sure, it feels like it. Several of its most promising story threads go nowhere - foremost amongst them the existence of a first Earth, or E1 in the lingo - and there are innumerable other instances of the author seeding this world of worlds with twists and intricacies as-yet untold. But you know what? Planesrunner is the first novel is a series, and if the second and the third and so on (and so fourth) are anything like as exhilarating as this, it's a series that stands to redefine award-winning author Ian McDonald's place in the multiverse of speculative fiction.
