The Long Earth

Fun and entertaining sci-fi story in which characters investigate different parallel versions of Earth.

Most of the book is taken up by explaining the backstory of “stepping”–the way that humans on our Earth learn to travel from parallel world to parallel world.

Once these new “Earth” are discovered, there are philosophical implications to such as how an endless supply of habitable planets provides humanity with new resources to exploit, old-west-style pioneering, and opportunities for a new life. As one character puts it:

“An end to scarcity and, may we hope, war. And perhaps a new meaning to life.”

“You have traveled far across the contingency tree of the possible, on a planet where dramatic but quasi-random extinction events periodically obliterate much of family life, leaving room for evolutionary innovation.”