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Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
Doubleday (Transworld
UK)
21 June 2012 / ISBN: 9780857520098
SF / 2026 / Madison, US and various locations
Amazon
US
- UK
Reviewed
by Rachel A Hyde
It is 2015
in Madison, Wisconsin and people, most of them children, have suddenly
vanished. They come back again pretty quickly most of them anyway
and have a tale to tell that seems beyond imagining. Our world is
not alone; there are many other replicas of it existing in an endless
chain. These are uninhabited apart from wildlife and with all resources
intact, ripe for exploration, and exploitation. All you need is
to construct a simple box device to get there unless of course you
happen to be a natural stepper like Joshua Valienté…
What do you get if you mix together the song "After the Gold
Rush", the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the TV
series "Terra Nova"? Answer: this book or something very
like it. There is a lot in here ranging from hard SF, a splash of
steampunk and of course thoughtful humor (courtesy of Sir Terry),
and to properly deal with it all a very much fatter novel would
be necessary. Instead you get tastes of many flavours and a cast
of rather too many walk-ons whose stories appear fascinating but
are not resolved, or in many cases more than touched on. The bulk
of the story involves Joshua who is signed up to explore the most
distant worlds in an airship, powered by a sinister being who might
once have been human but is now an omnipotent machine. It would
be great to more than touch on more of these worlds as he flashes
past them, and this would certainly make for a wonderful and inspiring
TV series in the right hands. In other chapters people become pioneers
and tell their stories, or find that they cannot step and decide
to cause trouble instead as the world passes them by. I don't often
wish that a book could be very much longer but there is a truly
epic tale in here, the first of a series and I look forward to seeing
how it will all develop when we have been given more than a glimpse
of the whole story.
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