I’ve been wrestling with this one for a few days. I liked it, but I didn’t loooove it, and it hurts me not to love a Terry Pratchett book. I don’t know if it’s because of Stephen Baxter’s co-authoring, or because of the spitefulness of the universe trying to strike down one of the planet’s best authors with Alzheimer’s (he got knighted for services to literature! how cool is that?), or if Pratchett was trying something new, but this book didn’t sing like his normally do. His Discworld books, and his standalone novels, all have an underlying current of…fierceness, maybe? Not sure what word I’m looking for. But he’s got such a strong voice, most of the time, and this one felt like it was written by just a regular author, not a well-nigh godlike one.
Enough whiny fangirling. The plot was interesting, at least. Seemingly unlimited alternate universes are discovered, and by building a small device called a Stepper, people can step west or east and find themselves on other, uninhabited Earths. They’re always in the same place geographically; if you step east or west in Madison, Wisconsin, you end up in a land where Wisconsin would be if there had been people. If you step while you’re on the third story of a building, you fall down, ’cause there are no buildings in the other Earths. They call this unending hallway of possibilities ‘The Long Earth.’ Governments are quick to claim all the same territory on all the other Earths. If you go homestead in what would have been Nebraska, you’re still technically on American soil.
Into all this expansion and wonder steps Joshua Valiente, a natural stepper who doesn’t need a gadget to move between worlds. He’s hired by a scientific corporation who wants to go to the end of the Long Earth, and see how many other worlds there are. On this journey, he sees every possibility of what Earth could have been: worlds with no water, worlds of only water, a world with no moon, a world destroyed by volcanoes, etc. Eventually he encounters other hominid creatures, but no humans anywhere.
It ends with a cliffhanger, and I believe it’s a trilogy. It was a good book, but it wasn’t a Pratchett Book. Now I have to decide if watered-down Pratchett is better than no Pratchett at all.