Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's Long Earth has been quite a treat for me since The Long Earth was published back in 2012. Taking place on an Earth where citizens can "step" into parallel Earths, (basically the same as ours, excepting the fact that human's don't appear to naturally exist on any other Earth discovered so far), the series looks at how, over the course of decades, society would deal with the sudden appearance of effectively unlimited resources and land, simply a step away from everyone.
This book, the fourth of a projected five, was a little melancholy for me, as co-author Terry Pratchett passed away earlier this year, it's hard to read the book without realizing that you are coming down to the last few novels from this writer.
The Long Utopia continues the story from the third book in the series The Long Mars, but in this one an interesting twist is added. New creatures begin to appear in a parallel earth, but unlike humans who've got there by either stepping "east" or "west", these creatures have stepped in from somewhere else altogether, kind of like the sphere who tries to explain his three-dimensional world to a square in Edwin Abbott's Flatland.
Following along with the conceit from the previous novels, all of the main characters are now in their later fifties and early sixties, which definitely adds to the one dimension not benefited by the introduction of the Long Earth, time. No matter how much exploration the characters have been able to do across millions of parallel Earths in the series to date, they are all getting older and their stories will be ending soon.
A good read.
This week I read the final novel in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's Long Earth sequence, The Long Mars.
As with the previous two books in the series, The Long Mars focuses on a near future world where technology has allowed mankind to "step" from our world to parallel Earths, only unlike in most parallel Earth fiction, these new worlds are largely unpopulated.
What I've loved about the series is how it plays with exactly how this sort of dramatic increase in resource would effect our world - if you move dozen (or even millions) of parallel Earths away from home and create your own town, why would you owe taxes to your home country? If you can travel millions of worlds away, what could be billions of worlds away?
In The Long Earth, one of those worlds is simply called "the gap" in that version of Earth there actually isn't any Earth at all, simply a void where our planet should be - so certain scientists begin the process of building space stations there. One of the real challenges of space exploration is escaping Earth's gravity, so the ability to simply step into a space where the Earth isn't dramatically changes the resources required to explore our solar system.
In the end I loved this book, it was a lot of fun, and does feel like the end of a sequence, it plays around in both space and time (one of the story lines covers more than a decade while the others are limited to a few months) my only mild complaint about the book is that on page 287 there is a spoiler for Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars - although to be fair, that book was published 19 years ago, so part of the blame may lie with me.
