Double Review: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter/The Orphaned Worlds by Michael Cobley

I have gotten behind on my reviews again. D'oh! Part of the blame is a trip I took last month, a trip on which I read these two books! So, maybe this is a good excuse for a double review post for The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter and The Orphaned Worlds by Michael Cobley.

Meanwhile, my annual reading of the Hugo finalists has begun, so look for those reviews soon! (I also will be at Worldcon again this year!)

 The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

The Long Earth revolves around a great premise for a novel--humanity learns to "step" into millions of alternate Earths. Humanity only seems to exist on this Earth, but there are still plenty of mysteries to explore.

If you've read Pratchett and Baxter, this novel reads exactly like a collaboration between them, with some of Pratchett's humor and whimsy as well as a lot of Baxter's wild sci-fi ideas. If anything, this feels more like a Baxter novel to me, although there are signs of Pratchett as well (the potato clock mechanism that allows one to step into another universe, etc.).

The plot is interesting or rather, really there are plots in the plural, some of which are almost more vignettes. We don't spend nearly as much time with the characters mentioned on the back of the book as I would have thought, but instead we spend. lot of time with an orphan who grew up with the natural ability to step and a formerly human AI super mind.

The somewhat fractal (or fractured?) nature of the plot probably makes sense for a book about a multiverse. It also makes more sense when you realize there are several sequels (which may or may not pick up some of these threads later).

Overall, I really enjoyed this even if it wasn't quite what I thought it would be. I particularly enjoyed the central mystery, which involves some patented Baxter-ish sci-fi fun. I may get to the sequels sometime in this or some other Earth.

The Orphaned Worlds by Michael Cobley

I probably waited too long (four years) to pick up this sequel to Seeds of Earth. Even with a little plot summary of Book One at the beginning and a dramatis personae at the end, I had trouble remembering, not so much who's who, but why anybody was doing what they were doing. Some of this is my fault for waiting so long, but some of it may just be Cobley's style. He likes to use a lot of terms without explanation (not every term is even mentioned in the secondary material), and he's a "losing the forest for the trees" sort of author (or maybe I'm just wanting more about the forest).

All that out of the way, this is still a fun space opera with cool aliens, ancient artifacts, various factions, and battles, lots of battles (this one verges on military SF, which is not my favorite). As with the first volume, the mystery of the ancient alien stuff and the alien Uvovo were my favorite parts. It was also fun to see this universe expand a bit, both in time and space.

Will I go on to Book Three? Maybe I need an alien artifact or space drug to know the answer, but I hope it doesn't take me another four years.