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.