The Long Earth

I’m a sucker for alternate history and parallel worlds.  You remember how bad Sliders was?  I loved the first few seasons of that show.  I used to comb comic stands for Marvel’s “What If” issues, despite how uniformly awful they ended up being.  Alternate history has always presented a sort of amusement park of the mind for me, where I’m free to explore a different take on my familiar surroundings without consequence.

The Long Earth hits just that exact note with me.  A parallel dimension story by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth explores a world where not only is it possible to travel to other Earths, but it is so easy that a child can do it.  The general gist is that someone invents a machine called a stepper.  With it you can shift between parallel realities that lie right next to each other, much like stepping from one room of a house into another.  The whole device can be assembled at radio shack and is powered by a potato, and the plans can be found online.  In no other Earths are there any signs of advanced civilization, so they are rich with unspoiled nature and opportunity.

The book is basically split up into two stories, the main action occuring 15 years after Step Day, the first major public revelation of the technology.  The first story is that of the main character, Joshua Valiente, who is possibly the most accomplished stepper in the world due to his ability to step naturally, without the device.  Where almost all others that step require the machine and have extreme nausea upon stepping, Joshua is able to flit through worlds at the bat of an eye.  The main thread of the book follows Joshua and the artificial intelligence(?) Lobsang, who claims to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman, as they travel farther than any other explorers have gone, searching for the ends of the Long Earth.  This part of the story holds your attention easily, though it is much more travelogue than action oriented sci-fi.  It’s sort of like watching Tron starring Anthony Bourdain.  Most of the story is spent on the description and discussion of the wonder available in the Long Earth, with small bits of action tossed in for flavor.

The other part of the story is a collection of chapters written from the perspective of various other residents of the Long Earth, and serves to establish how the world changes in the face of the new stepper technology.  The economy is severely shaken, as material goods no longer have any significant value beyond their industrial worth.  With an infinite number of Earths to harvest for resources, there is no longer any real scarcity to deal with.  Security is also an issue, as someone can step to one parallel Earth, walk through where a wall would be on Datum Earth, then step back.  By far the largest change society must deal with, however, is the launch of a new era of homesteading expansion.  In the Long Earth, it’s possible for every single person to have as much land and space as they want, so there is no longer any reason for the working classes to remain on Datum Earth, working for industrial bosses.  We don’t get a chance to see the real long term effects of this on Earth, as only 15 years have passed since the advent of the technology, but it’s not hard to extrapolate serious long term social changes.  Agriculture is no longer strictly necessary to produce enough food for humans – it would be possible to revert to a complete hunter/gatherer model.

Where the novel really succeeds is in blending these two stories together and igniting the imagination toward exploration.  It does an excellent job of capturing the feel of American frontier fiction.  It’s one of the few sci-fi novels I’ve read where the scientific breakthrough that pushes the book into sci-fi causes largely POSITIVE changes for humanity.  I actually wish that I lived in this universe instead of our own, which is very rare for a good sci-fi novel.

Where the book fails is in its use of language and its scope.  Despite the book being set in America and being about Americans, it uses strictly British slang.  No American professor has ever “taken a post at university.”  It doesn’t seem like much, but in a book that is so much about a mythologized American experience, it’s extremely jarring to have the tale told in the traditional British “handle every word with a pair of tongs and rubber gloves” kind of style.

The most frustration part, however, is that it is ALL set-up.  I purchased it thinking it was a standalone novel, only to reach the end and have no real conclusions to most of the questions posed by the story, and not in a good “makes me think about it more” way.  No, in a Lost “this isn’t actually a real ending” kind of way.

The book is still very worth it, though, and hopefully will be even more worth it after I read its sequel, The Long War.