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Summary
Summary
1916: The western front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of no-man's-land gone? For that matter, where has Percy gone?
2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Police officer Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive-some said mad, others alleged dangerous-scientist who seems to have vanished. Sifting through the wreckage, Jansson find a curious gadget: a box containing some rudimentary wiring, a three-way switch, and ... a potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way humankind views the world forever.
The first novel in an exciting new collaboration between Discworld creator Terry Pratchett and acclaimed science fiction writer Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth transports listeners to the ends of the earth-and far beyond. All it takes is a single step ...
Author Notes
Terry Pratchett was on born April 28, 1948 in Beaconsfield, United Kingdom. He left school at the age of 17 to work on his local paper, the Bucks Free Press. While with the Press, he took the National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency class. He also worked for the Western Daily Press and the Bath Chronicle. He produced a series of cartoons for the monthly journal, Psychic Researcher, describing the goings-on at the government's fictional paranormal research establishment, Warlock Hall. In 1980, he was appointed publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board with responsibility for three nuclear power stations.
His first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971. His first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. He became a full-time author in 1987. He wrote more than 70 books during his lifetime including The Dark Side of the Sun, Strata, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery, Truckers, Diggers, Wings, Dodger, Raising Steam, Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Tales, and The Shephard's Crown. He was diagnosis with early onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007. He was knighted for services to literature in 2009 and received the World Fantasy award for life achievement in 2010. He died on March 12, 2015 at the age of 66.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this thought-provoking collaboration, Pratchett (the Discworld series) and Baxter (Stone Spring) create an infinity of worlds to explore. A revolutionary process known as Stepping has allowed humanity access to an unlimited number of parallel Earths, all devoid of human life. The further one travels, the stranger the variant worlds become. Joshua Valiente, one of a rare breed who can Step without external help, is hired by the transEarth Institute to travel by airship across the Long Earth, exploring as far as possible. Accompanied by Lobsang, a Tibetan reincarnated as an artificial intelligence, he journeys across millions of Earths, discovering just what sort of bizarre secrets lurk in the farthest reaches. The slow-burning plot plays second fiddle to the fascinating premise, and the authors seem to have more fun developing backstory and concepts than any real tension. An abrupt conclusion comes as an unwelcome end to this tale of exploration. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
On Step Day, Joshua Valiente, a 13-year-old resident of a small Catholic orphanage in Madison, Wisconsin, has just built a Stepper. When he moves its switch, he disappears. Only to the nearest parallel universe, however, where he finds several young neighbors who built Steppers, too. Whereas they're confused and nauseated, he's his usual calm, methodical self. He figures out how to get home and helps the others back. Fifteen years later and having found he can travel between parallel worlds without a Stepper, he's recruited for a mission bound as many worlds away as it can get in a ship virtually inhabited by the human-become-machine intelligence, Lobsang. Quickly beyond all human-colonized alternate Earths, Joshua and Lobsang discover other creatures capable of stepping that are fleeing an approaching danger the explorers are on course to meet. Well beyond the millionth world, they encounter the great peril maybe. Stay tuned for the next episode of a very old-fashioned sf quest yarn (think Jules Verne and 2001) that, since Pratchett is involved, is crammed with scientifically informed amusement.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
You know the way books include a page listing previously published works by the author? In The Long Earth that list runs to five pages and includes 112 titles. Pratchett and Baxter are certainly no strangers to productivity, or popularity, and this, their first collaboration, is a marriage made in fan heaven - Pratchett's warmth and humanity allied to Baxter's extraordinarily fertile science-fictional imagination. The Long Earth is the first in a projected series that looks set to ratchet that 112 up a few notches. The central idea is a string of alternate earths, all within the same spacetime as our world but each occupying different quantum dimensions that are "the thickness of a thought away". Alt-earth is a hoary old standard of SF, of course, and usually writers shove-ha'penny their characters into these same-but-different worlds in order to explore historical counterfactuals - Hitler winning the second world war, and so on. But Pratchett and Baxter have a neat new spin on the notion: their enormous chain of parallel earths is entirely empty of humanity. It's a string of pristine Edens inhabited only by the Eocene fauna that were, on our world, hunted to extinction by early man. People "step" into these neighbouring dimensions via a gimcrack device: a box with a switch on top, powered (this seems to be important) by electricity generated by a potato. Because the "stepper" box is so easily made, millions of ordinary people are able simply to wink out of existence in this world and start a new life in any one of the unending series of invitingly empty, pastorally perfect earths. The Long Earth reads much more like a Baxter novel than a Pratchett one. It's not very funny, for one thing - discounting some wry dialogue and one not-very-successful stab at a comic character (a deceased Tibetan monk who has been reincarnated as a superintelligent drinks dispenser). Instead our hero, Joshua, explores stepwise for a million earths or so, the whole journey rendered with a characteristically Baxteresque mix of big-scale imagination and scientific rigour. The resulting novel is a surprisingly gentle piece of work. Something Wicked, or at least Something Worrying, is sweeping in from the further reaches of the long earth, driving frightened steppers before it like refugees; but it's a long time before we become aware of this, and not much is made of it. Otherwise human settlement upon the alternate earths is rural and low-tech (steppers cannot carry iron with them, for unexplained reasons) and almost entirely free of crime, rapine and nastiness. Lacking the pressures of overpopulation and with infinite natural resources to draw on, people just seem to get along with one another. Indeed, I'm tempted to call The Long Earth an exercise in utopian writing; an unfashionable mode nowadays, when grim-and-gritty dystopias rule the publishing roost. But I, for one, found it extremely refreshing. The Long Earth is a short read: the pages riffle past and there's much to enjoy. The dialogue is a bit Hollywood 101, and much of it is characters explaining things to other characters, sometimes at great length ("Why are you telling me all this?" Joshua asks at one point, with apparent ingenuousness). But it's a charming, absorbing and somehow spacious piece of imagineering for all that. Adam Roberts's Jack Glass (Gollancz) will be published in July. To order The Long Earth for pounds 12.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Adam Roberts The central idea is a string of alternate earths, all within the same spacetime as our world but each occupying different quantum dimensions that are "the thickness of a thought away". Alt-earth is a hoary old standard of SF, of course, and usually writers shove-ha'penny their characters into these same-but-different worlds in order to explore historical counterfactuals - Hitler winning the second world war, and so on. But [Pratchett] and Baxter have a neat new spin on the notion: their enormous chain of parallel earths is entirely empty of humanity. It's a string of pristine Edens inhabited only by the Eocene fauna that were, on our world, hunted to extinction by early man. People "step" into these neighbouring dimensions via a gimcrack device: a box with a switch on top, powered (this seems to be important) by electricity generated by a potato. Because the "stepper" box is so easily made, millions of ordinary people are able simply to wink out of existence in this world and start a new life in any one of the unending series of invitingly empty, pastorally perfect earths. - Adam Roberts.
Kirkus Review
Pratchett, author of the esteemed Discworld yarns (Snuff, 2011, etc.), and collaborator Baxter (Stone Spring, 2011, etc.) venture into alternate worlds. Eccentric, reclusive genius Willis Linsay of Madison, Wis., publishes on the web instructions for building a strange device consisting of a handful of common components, some wires, a three-way control and a potato. A flick of the switch ("west" or "east") sends the builder into an alternate Earth--one of a possibly infinite sequence--where there are no humans at all, though there are other creatures descended from hominid stock. Some people are natural "steppers," able to step into the Long Earth without any device. Another minority are phobics, unable to step at all. Steppers can take with them only what they can carry, while iron in any form doesn't cross. Thanks to the strange circumstances of his birth, Joshua Valient is a natural. The transEarth Institute, a wing of the huge Black Corporation, offers him a job exploring and reporting on the new worlds. His partner in the enterprise will be a zeppelin inhabited by Lobsang, a distributed artificial intelligence whose human component was once a humble Tibetan. Meanwhile, back on Datum, the original Earth, officer Monica Jansson grows increasingly concerned about the anti-stepping rants of powerful demagogue Brian Cowley. Thousands of steps from home, Joshua runs into another independent-minded stepper, Sally, who turns out to be Willis' daughter. They visit a community, Happy Landings, founded thousands of years ago by natural steppers and trolls, gentle hominids who communicate via music. But both trolls and their viciously homicidal cousins, elves, are step-fleeing toward Datum from something very scary indeed. This often intriguing development of a science fiction trope takes a scattershot approach and could have used more of Pratchett's trademark satire and Puckish humor. Still, the authors have plenty of fresh insights to offer, and fans of either will want to tag along and see where it all leads.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Step Day, 2015: the day that physicist Willis Linsay posts the plans for a simple electronic device on the Internet-a device that unlocks the door to a million parallel, seemingly uninhabited Earths and leads to a wholesale exodus of the adventurous, the oppressed, and the disaffected. Fast forward 15 years. One of the handful of natural "steppers"-people who can move from one world to the next without the device-is loner Joshua Valiente, who's ventured farther into the chain of alternate worlds than anyone else. He's enlisted by Lobsang (a late Tibetan motorcycle repairman who's been reincarnated as the world's smartest computer and is part owner of transEarth Technologies) to accompany him on an exploratory mission to find out if there's any end to the Long Earth. But what Joshua doesn't know is that some of the worlds are inhabited after all, just not by humans. Verdict Unlike Pratchett's previous collaborations (Good Omens with Neil Gaiman; The Science of Discworld with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen), this is a surprisingly serious and thought-provoking work, albeit one with unmistakably Pratchettesque flourishes of humor throughout. The overall tone is much closer to Baxter's excellent "Destiny's Children" series, with numerous diversions into alternate histories, evolutionary biology, and the search for the spiritual, both human and otherwise. Pratchett and Baxter fans will enjoy.-John Harvey, Irving P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
