- Pratchett, Terry and Stephen Baxter.
The Long War.
New York: HarperCollins, 2013.
ISBN 978-0-06-206869-9.
-
This is the second novel in the authors' series which began with
The Long Earth (November 2012). That
book, which I enjoyed immensely, created a vast new arena for
storytelling: a large, perhaps infinite, number of parallel Earths,
all synchronised in time, among which people can “step”
with the aid of a simple electronic gizmo (incorporating a
potato) whose inventor posted the plans on the Internet on
what has since been called Step Day. Some small fraction of
the population has always been “natural steppers”—able
to move among universes without mechanical assistance, but other
than that tiny minority, all of the worlds of the Long Earth
beyond our own (called the Datum) are devoid of humans. There
are natural stepping humanoids, dubbed “elves” and
“trolls”, but none with human-level intelligence.
As this book opens, a generation has passed since Step Day, and
the human presence has begun to expand into the vast expanses of
the Long Earth. Most worlds are pristine wilderness, with all
the dangers to pioneers venturing into places where
large predators have never been controlled. Joshua Valienté,
whose epic voyage of exploration with Lobsang (who from moment to
moment may be a motorcycle repairman, computer network, Tibetan
monk, or airship) discovered the wonders of these innumerable worlds
in the first book, has settled down to raise a family on a world
in the Far West.
Humans being humans, this gift of what amounts of an infinitely
larger scope for their history has not been without its drawbacks
and conflicts. With the opening of an endless frontier, the
restless and creative have decamped from the Datum to seek adventure
and fortune free of the crowds and control of their increasingly
regimented home world. This has resulted in a drop in innovation and
economic hit to the Datum, and for Datum politicians (particularly
in the United States, the grabbiest of all jurisdictions) to seek
to expand their control (and particularly the ability to loot) to
all residents of the so-called “Aegis”—the
geographical footprint of its territory across the multitude of
worlds. The trolls, who mostly get along with humans and work for
them, hear news from across the worlds through their “long
call” of scandalous mistreatment of their kind by humans
in some places, and now appear to have vanished from many human
settlements to parts unknown. A group of worlds in the American
Aegis in the distant West have adopted the Valhalla Declaration,
asserting their independence from the greedy and intrusive government
of the Datum and, in response, the Datum is sending a fleet of
stepping airships (or “twains”, named for the Mark
Twain of the first novel) to assert its authority over these
recalcitrant emigrants. Joshua and Sally Linsay, pioneer explorers,
return to the Datum to make their case for the rights of trolls. China
mounts an ambitious expedition to the unseen worlds of its footprint
in the Far East.
And so it goes, for more than four hundred pages. This really
isn't a novel at all, but rather four or five novellas
interleaved with one another, where the individual stories
barely interact before most of the characters
meet at a barbecue in the next to last chapter. When I put down
The Long Earth, I concluded that the authors had
created a stage in which all kinds of fiction could play
out and looked forward to seeing what they'd do with it. What a
disappointment! There are a few interesting concepts, such as
evolutionary consequences of travel between parallel Earths and
technologies which oppressive regimes use to keep their subjects
from just stepping away to freedom, but they are few and far
between. There is no war! If you're going to title
your book The Long War, many readers are going to
expect one, and it doesn't happen. I can recall only two
laugh-out-loud lines in the entire book, which is hardly what
you expect when picking up a book with Terry Pratchett's name on
the cover. I shall not be reading the remaining books in the
series which, if Amazon reviews are to be believed, go downhill from
here.
March 2017 