The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
Most of our world is centered around scarcity. Money only exists because there isn’t enough for everyone to have everything they want. Land is also a limited resource and one that you can’t make anymore of. Even governments exist, in part, because of those limits. So, what might happen to human society if one day almost all of those scarcities disappeared. While not the only question asked in The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, it is one of the major themes and one that I found interesting.
The basic idea of The Long Earth is that someone creates a device that is exceptionally easy to make and allows you to move into parallel earths. Those earths don’t have people in them but are otherwise Earth, and they are infinite. This means that anyone who wants to could go to a world and gather gold from the same place as it was first discovered in California or wander empty worlds hunting and gathering, but to make it interesting they can’t take iron between worlds and they can only take what they can carry so they have to start over on each world.
The story follows Joshua, who is a natural stepper. This means he can travel between these worlds without a tool, and he doesn’t get sick when he travels between them like other people. Because of this, he has traveled further than almost anyone. He is hired by an AI who claims to be a reincarnated Buddhist motorcycle repairman who wants to explore the Long Earth in an airship that can travel between the worlds because it is inhabited by the intelligent AI.
An excellent science fiction story, this book did an excellent job of world building, storytelling and character development. Of the three the weakest is probably the storytelling because while the traveling allows for plenty of interesting events, the major mystery is introduced fairly late and the antagonist, such as it is, doesn’t get introduced until almost the end. But that is really the nature of this science fiction that reminds me of something like Ringworld where the exploration of the idea and the world is the plot and while this story doesn’t dig into the science, how Ringworld did it has more interesting characters.
This was a fun story, though I’m not sure if it is one that will stick with him the way the very best science fiction does but some ideas are interesting enough that I plan to read at least the next book in the series to see what happens. And if it continues to expand on what it has already built in this story and explains more of what is happening, then it’s entirely possible that my opinion of this book may go up, but for now if you’re a huge fan of Ringworld but would prefer it without the baggage then this book could scratch that same itch.