The Long Earth

This is a good book, but not as good a book as it would have been had it been better.

My understanding of the genesis is that the original concept was Pratchett's from the ‘80's, and the execution was truly collaborative. The writing has definite Pratchettesque moments, and the book starts out very well, but in the end I get the feeling that this is a story that wants to be written by a collaboration between Brian Stableford and Baxter's sometime collaborator Arthur C Clarke, not Sir Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.

The positives are pretty considerable: the authors tell the story of a huge shift in physical possibility (“stepping” between alternate Earths) over the few decades following it from multiple points of view, interspersed with amusing anecdotes regarding particularly unfortunate encounters with the unknown, often involving the Four Horsemen of the New Apocalypse: Greed, Confusion, Inability to Follow Rules, and Miscellaneous Abrasions (or something like that.)

But the evolutionary speculations are a walking shadow of Stableford's far deeper insights, and the eerie evocation of lost civilizations and alternate solar systems fall short of Clarke's inimitable (apparently) poetry.

“Not as good as Stableford or Clarke” is admittedly fainting with damned praise. I'm not familiar with Baxter's stand-alone work (and I've avoided Clarke collaborations since the Gentry Lee debacle) so I have a tendency to assume it's all his fault, which is hardly fair. It may well be that it's really the fault of the story itself, which does seem to want a particular type of telling. On the other hand, the Disc World stories wanted a particular type of telling too, and it took a few runs at it for Pratchett to develop that voice, so I have every expectation that future books in this series will take us in new and interesting directions as the authors find their feet in the remarkable universe they have created.

WHAT
An ambitious and interesting but underdeveloped plot. You find an infinite number of Earths, but all of them are empty. The book seems to be about how people would react to the idea, not about the different worlds themselves, and the authors fails to make that an engaging tale.

PLOT
People have discovered how to travel between alternate versions of our Earth. Anyone can do it and it only takes a second. There is a man who can do it without side effects, and this ability makes him a person of interest for the parties interested in exploring the most distant Earths that others have a hard time to reach.

SUMMARY
The multiverse theory is true and there is possibly an infinite number of Earths just like our own, representing different versions of what could have been our reality if certain circumstances were different. Think butterfly effect.

These Earths collectively are known as The Long Earth and any person can “step” into them with the help of an easily made device. The travel is also very fast, it takes only a second to do it, but there are some side effects. Stepping through these different Earths causes the individual to become nauseous for about 15 minutes, inducing vomit during that period.

So far people haven't stepped trough many Earths, because there is no need for so many planets. The ones they did explored seems to be almost identical to ours, but in different periods of time, and none of them have shown any sign of life. But already some interesting consequences have started to develop. Gold and other precious metals have lost their value, because now everybody can go to a different Earth and locate a gold ore site that is already known in our Earth.

Criminals have found new ways to commit felony through stepping, because it makes for a very easy mode of escaping. Laws have also been affected. Does the America from an alternative Earth falls into our own America's jurisdiction?

The story focus on a man that is capable of stepping without the help of any device and no side effects whatsoever, and a dead Tibetan monk reincarnated into a computer. This talking computer have found a way to travel through Earths much faster. Together they will travel to the farthest Earth they could possible find. You know, for the lul.

ANALYSIS
Starting with the talking computer, I expect that somewhere in this or the next books it will show why is he relevant to the plot. Maybe he was the one who created the Long Earth or something of that proportion. Otherwise this is just the “talking dog” that everyone treats like a normal character in the plot.

My summary shows all the interesting parts of what I read. You have all this worlds, that could have anything possible happening in them. That is a lot of potential, yet they're all empty. And they are also all too similar to ours. The things I described above could have been the introduction to the book, fitting in one page. This was however 20% of the book, and it didn't show signs it would get any better.

Too much time is spent on developing characters that I did not care about, and details that didn't seem to matter. In other words, I did not like the setting and the world building of the authors. The dialog was boring as well.

I find this story to suffer from the same problem as many other books I've (tried to) read that were also from famous authors and had a promising idea: it focus too much on the boring parts. This is the case of Journey to the Center of the Earth, for instance.


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