I've read every one of the Discworld books but have to confess to shying away from the "Hard Science Fiction" that Stephen Baxter is best known for. So it was with a mixture of interest and trepidation that I approached The Long Earth, the first of this collaborative series between Baxter and Terry Pratchett.
*SPOILER ALERT*
The basic premise is very ingenious indeed. A man discovers that there are apparently an infinite number of Earths and works out how to move between them, what he terms "stepping". He puts the schematic for the device on the internet and soon everyone is stepping across worlds. Humanity, free from the constraints of a single world, begins to expand into the new worlds. What does The Long Earth hold in store for the species?
The Long Earth follows two or three different plot strands which don't quite tie together in this book but obviously are all related in the long run.
The first follows a strange pairing; "natural stepper" Joshua (who doesn't need a device to traverse the worlds) and a Tibetan motorcycle repairman who has been reincarnated as a seemingly omniscient software program called Lobsang. Lobsang and Joshua are travelling through the Long Earth in Lobsang's airship, trying to divine the reason for the phenomenon and also learn more about it. This is the main bulk of the story and probably takes up 60-70% of the book.
The other plotlines follow (a) a group of pioneers who are looking to settle on a world far from the main Earth (called the Datum) and "start again" (b) a policewoman based on a world next to the Datum (c) a lone traveller who has worked out the way to perform multiple "steps" in one go. Wrapped around all this is a mystery which becomes more and more important during the course of the story. When finally solved however, I will confess myself slightly disappointed. Pratchett always had a fantastic way of tieing up his plotlines in interesting ways but this just felt, meh. You sense more may be coming but it didn't really work for me.
Plot definitely drives this story though as I felt the characters didn't really grab my attention. Being used to Pratchett's style I found the characters were not quite what I expected. Whether Baxter has had more of a say in their development or not I don't know, but this is a much less "quirky" offering than we are used to from the Discworld (except for Lobsang).
Maybe we will learn more about them in the future offerings but, considering the sequel is set 10 years later, I doubt it. I found difficulty in identifying or understanding the majority of the characters, they just seem to be lacking depth and it felt as though a lot of them were afterthoughts to the story concept.
I desperately wanted to love this book, but I didn't. I did enjoy it but maybe it was a victim of my expectations rather than anything else. It is not bad at all, I just hoped for more. I'll definitely read the later ones as they are still a fantastic concept, hopefully with a bit more time together Pratchett and Baxter can get their styles meshed a bit better.
Verdict: 3.5 stars out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment