Tak! reviewed The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
The Space between Worlds
5 stars
Original, innovative, grim, politically relevant, amazing
Paperback, 336 pages
English language
Published Aug. 5, 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton.
5 stars
(3 reviews)
Eccentric genius Adam Bosch has cracked the multiverse and discovered a way to travel to parallel Earths. There's just one problem: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive.
Enter Cara. Of the 380 realities that have been unlocked, Cara is dead in all but 8.
Born in the wastelands outside the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City, Cara has fought her entire life just to survive. So when she's offered a job travelling the multiverse, and a safe place in the city to call home, she's willing to do anything to keep it that way.
But then one of her doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, and Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined - and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just …
Eccentric genius Adam Bosch has cracked the multiverse and discovered a way to travel to parallel Earths. There's just one problem: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive.
Enter Cara. Of the 380 realities that have been unlocked, Cara is dead in all but 8.
Born in the wastelands outside the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City, Cara has fought her entire life just to survive. So when she's offered a job travelling the multiverse, and a safe place in the city to call home, she's willing to do anything to keep it that way.
But then one of her doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, and Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined - and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her Earth, but the entire multiverse.
A stunning science fiction debut, The Space Between Worlds is both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege and belonging.
enne📚 reviewed The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #1)
The Space Between Worlds
5 stars
I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.
This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same …
I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.
This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same characters in different timelines where their lives had taken different paths.
The post-apocalyptic wasteland locale of this novel is split into the wealthy folks of Wiley City living behind a wall (literally and metaphorically the airquotes nice white people of this story), the religious Ruralites, and the survivors of Ashtown between them. Cara is constantly code switching and crossing borders, both locally and multiversally--she is pretending to be a Ruralite, is secretly from Ashtown, while she precariously lives in Wiley City (hoping to get citizenship). Thematically, I love how the book ends with doubling down on Cara's role as an intermediary between worlds.
