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If anyone advises you to chase your dreams, no matter what, they are advocating psychopathic behaviour. Chase your dreams, not fantasies.

Pavane - Keith Roberts

Well here's a book which genuinely surprised me. I imagined this would be a heavy-on-exposition exploration of the effects of a huge cause - the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I. What this actually is is a beautifully crafted exploration of this strange version of the alternate late-20th century using richly, thoughtfully and humanely created characters who allow you glimpses of the rest of the world from a small corner of an England (Angle-Land) occupied by a militant, controlling and constricting Roman Catholic empire. As brush strokes lend humanity to a scene un-framed in standard vision, so does Roberts' observation and craft lend life to this bizarre reality. Without his calm and steady hand, this interlinked collection of stories could have been hackneyed, schmaltzy or even boring. His painterly prose are like individual flames lending art to the heat of fire; they mesmerise whilst they sustain.

I found myself reading and re-reading passages just to have his imagery re-form in my head.

Roberts' skill doesn't end simply with his style of prose. The stories told here expertly illustrate and animate a world seemingly trapped under a millennium-long dictatorship, actually on the verge of all-out change and revolution. This revolution is not introduced with chauvinist bombast, flag waving or hill-top speeches though. It is allowed, with the patience of someone truly confident in his material (and materiel), to seep into your mind through implication before its ultimate reveal, and even that reveal is merely a beginning, a jumping-off point. No one of the characters is a Hero, and no one is born with a manifest destiny, or a vengeance or even so much as a steely eye towards justice. They are humans; agents of circumstance. They are us, and because of that novels like this are so desperately important.

And you are not a hero, this novel will tell you. You are never completely correct in your prejudices. Roberts toys with our need to sort people into heroes and villains, sort plots into good versus evil. But his revelations towards the end of the book, that evil perhaps must exist to warn us against worse mistakes, are truly sobering.

We must always fight for Humanity, and our humanity, but an essential part of that fight is keeping watch on our past, and never mistaking the urge for vengeance for the urge to force good into the world and bad out. This novel will always be prescient.

 

The Long Earth - Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett

Well I'll start by simply saying that I could not put this book down. Pratchett and Baxter have created a fantastic cooperative writing style here mixing interesting character work, philosophy and incredibly enthusiastic world building. At the very least, I was expecting a fascinating new universe to stretch my mind out into, but these two give so much more than that.

 

Where it must have been so tempting for them to immediately start describing their endless worlds, the first theme to be explored is actually the very human reactions to the concept of "stepping" - the ability to move to neighbouring dimensions using a home-made machine, the blueprints of which are freely available on the internet - and the social effects this has back home. There are two brilliant conceits at work here. The first is that anyone can make one of these machines using household junk, and the second is that all Earths aside from this one are devoid of Homo Sapiens. A huge exodus begins from this "Datum" earth, which is often compared to the move West into the New World but is actually the start of something quite profound. Iron is non-transmittable through dimensions, so industry and infrastructure effectively has to start again over and over. The difference between the move into the Long Earth and the conquest of the New World is that the concept of infinite Earths removes the need to any sort of territorialism and the social side-effect this brings.

Instantly, infinite Eden is open to humanity. There's so much here that I desperately want to write about but even more desperately don't want to ruin. All I will say is that the human exploration and exploitation of The Long Earth is fantastically explored through families, individual characters and the description of government responses. The description of the British response is wonderfully venomous, in particular.

 

Using this social exploration as their take-off point, the possibilities of this infinite Earth quickly become apparent, and again, I'd rather not get into too much of this for want of not ruining some of the more magical surprises. Sufficed to say, there is a spectacular range of variation in The Long Earth, and yes, there are dinosaurs. There is also a dimension where Earth straight up isn't there, which... Well I'll let you think about the possibilities of that. It leads to one of my favourite written conversations ever. One of those conversations where you can almost physically feel your horizons being stretched open. The kind of writing that electrifies me from Arthur C. Clarke. It's that awesome.

 

For me, however, all of this was just delicious, epic garnish I felt the actual meat of this story was the questions it raises about intelligence, sapience, consciousness and our Homo Sapiens-centric take on the universe. It's not giving too much away to say that one of the main characters in this is an AI living within the (possibly legitimate) guise of a reincarnated Tibetan. There are also other possibly hominin/humanoid species so wonderfully different that their sapience is actually in question. Don't read on if you don't want spoilers. On top of all this, we have a colossal polyp intelligence bearing a distinct (and referenced) similarity to the zealous emergent intelligence blob in The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke (for the love of God read that book if you haven't already). I particularly loved that the rivalries and differences between the various intelligences in this book were not the predictably territorial ones done to death in... well all of human mythology to be quite frank. They are conceptual, due to the origin of intelligence. These differences are dealt with not through disagreement, argument or war, but through rising alarm and suspicion with the realisation of unpredictability innate to a lack of common ground and a lack of context. The Big Bad in this book is not some cackling villain with lightning in the background; it is a being with homogenising motives philosophically identical to our own, down to the justification of love, and therefore ultimately threatening to us. Whilst reading the final act of this book, I couldn't help thinking of Steve Jones in Almost Like a Whale (I think... It could have been The Descent of Man) when he pointed out the wonderfully, epiphanically obvious: There is no conflict like that between animals attempting to occupy the same niche.

 

Overall, this book comes highly recommended. It was a hell of a lot of fun, eminently readable and just exceptional food for thought. I spent several days after having finished reading mentally exploring my own personal image of The Long Earth, and that, for me, is a hallmark of great fiction. I have to thank Baxter and Pratchett; they have created me a new world.