The Long EarthA Novel

Fans of the 1990s disaster that was the Jerry O’Connell-vehicle Sliders will be pleased to know that The Long Earth incorporates all of the cool parts of that show without any of the “What would happen if nerds were the star athletes?” sidebar. A collaboration between noted science fiction writers Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth focuses on one Joshua Valienté — the archetypal ordinary man with extraordinary powers.

One of the rare humans with the ability to step between universes, Valienté is at first a savior of children who inadvertently cross that invisible threshold, and later a corporate-sponsored explorer of the multiverse, traveling hundreds of thousands of earths beyond ours. Offering glimpses into our world as mass emigration sets in, Earth works best when it’s in travelogue mode. With Baxter’s hard sci-fi tendencies evening out Pratchett’s tendencies toward camp, Valienté is an everyman guide to unpeopled variations on Earth, like those on which dinosaurs rule.

The Long Earth traffics in more than the occasional SF cliché, but it’s a product of two of the genre’s masters, and they’re master weavers of this kind of tale.