Available:*
Library | Shelf Number | Material Type | Item Barcode | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Paddington Library | FICTION SF | Book | 30117801771201 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The dazzling new science fiction adventure from the extraordinary imaginations of Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter -- the fourth novel in a collaborative series that has been hailed as 'sense-of-wonder SF at its best.' ( Independent on Sunday ).
2045-2059. In spite of the world-changing upheavals of Step Day and the Yellowstone eruption -- humanity is spreading further into the Long Earth, and society, both on a battered Datum Earth and beyond, continues to evolve.
Lobsang, now an elderly and somewhat over-complex AI, seems to have suffered a breakdown of sorts. With Agnes, he now lives, in disguise, in an exotic High-Meggers world -- 'New Springfield' --- determined to lead a 'normal' life as a human colonist. They even adopt a child, a son. But it seems that Sally Linsay guided them there for a reason.
For it's at New Springfield that the Long Earth chain of worlds has become 'entangled' with another Long world -- an alien planet. Strange haunted-house sightings in a cellar reveal this alien world to be inhabited by voracious colonising cyborgs --- 'silver beetles' -- who seem to be modifying this world for their own terrifying purposes.
Elsewhere Joshua, now in his fifties, tries to track down the father he's never known. In so doing, he unravels a deeper history -- of natural steppers who banded together in Victorian London. At first they offered their services to the crown, but were eventually hunted down and their secret covered up. But their story didn't end there, and it would seem that an ancestor of Joshua's became embroiled in a clandestine 'Darwinian' programme involving these 19th century steppers.
Free from human control, the super-intelligent Next are growing up. As they debate how to 'manage' the vast herd of humans they live amongst, one of the brightest of them all begins to preach about the unity of all human kinds and in so doing stirs up both human and Next communities -- but then, still only young, he faces a new duty.
Meanwhile, on New Springfield, Lobsang has been joined by Joshua and they've discovered the ominous ultimate goal of the cyborg silver beetles and the vast machines they have created. The threat they pose to the Long Earth -- and other Long worlds -- convinces Lobsang and the others that the beetles' world has to be 'cauterised', taken out of the Long Earth chain, to prevent the spread of their kind. To achieve this will require super-stepping abilities -- and for some it will mean making the ultimate sacrifice.
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 (1)
Guardian Review
Pratchett and Baxter's fourth Long Earth novel is concerned with the limits of knowledge -- and insectile cyborgs on a distant parallel worldRead an extract from The Long Utopia here Though there's plenty of fun to be had from this latest instalment of Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter 's Long Earth series, I read it in a rather mournful frame of mind. Our supply of original Pratchett is running dangerously low. Since he continued working almost to the end, there are several posthumous titles in the offing: one more Discworld novel (The Shepherd's Crown, due at the end of August) and two Long Earth books -- this one and the series finale. After that, having been so busy a feature of the literary landscape for so many decades, and having inspired a devotion in his readers unparalleled in contemporary writing, Pratchett's voice will finally pass into silence. Something of that melancholy seems to have worked itself into the fabric of this novel, too. Earlier Long Earth books possess various degrees of whimsical warmth and inventive charm. A more autumnal breeze blows through The Long Utopia. It's a book much concerned with things coming to an end, with cosmic-scale disease and with the limits of knowledge. A premise that started as an infinite number of open doors is starting to close them around its characters. That premise: our planet is one of an apparently infinite chain of Earths, all superposed in quantum-displacement upon one another. Travel from our Earth into these alt-Earths is easily effected with a simple piece of technology (powered by a potato, in fact). Some individuals don't even need that, possessing the natural ability to "step" in one of the two directions available, up-chain or down, arbitrarily designated "west" and "east". The only constraints are that most people suffer debilitating nausea with repeated steps, and that it's impossible to carry iron from world to world. This means that most migrants up and down the Long Earth end up making old-fashioned 18th- or 19th-century-style settlements, having to mine their own iron, make their own nails and so on. The other oddity about the Long Earth, also as yet unexplained, is the complete absence of humans anywhere up or down the infinite chain of worlds except (of course) on ours, so-called "Datum Earth". If you go to these books looking for the rich comedy of Discworld, you will be disappointed. It's worth remembering that hilarity isn't Pratchett's only mode. He started out as a science fiction writer (and fan), and jotted down the conceit for the Long Earth before he wrote the first Discworld novel. Indeed, one of the things that made his fantasy writing so distinctive was the scientific rigour with which he pursued even the most absurd of his premises. Baxter, similarly prolific, is Britain's leading writer of "hard" SF, a seemingly inexhaustible fount of thought-provoking, imagination-tickling and sometimes mind-blowing ideas. Their collaboration is more a hymn to the joys of unfettered world-building than it is to story or character. But if the pace of plotting is gentle, the restless inventiveness more than compensates. It's not that nothing happens in the Long Earth series. The narrative is enlivened by terrorist plots, a new generation of superintelligent "homo superior" children, attempts to build space elevators, trips to Mars and a cataclysmic disaster on Datum Earth, plus we also get the more soap-like digressions on family secrets and dramas of the main characters. But nothing really disturbs the broad, tranquil flow of the novels, plainly written, expansive, taking the reader slowly through a cornucopia of alternate possible Earths. Some volumes work better than others. The first was buoyed along on its basic voyage of discovery; The Long War (not, despite its title, an especially martial text) lost some momentum; The Long Mars added some interesting speculations and alternate versions of the red planet. The Long Utopia is a better novel than these previous two, largely because it uses a compelling central mystery to thread together its various interesting extrapolations, cool ideas and YA-level storytelling. On the 1,217,756th Earth west of ours, some settlers stumble on something that's never before been encountered in this vast chain of planets: alien life. Insectile cyborg creatures are burrowing under the world, having, it seems, "stepped in" from an impossible direction. What they're up to, and what humanity can do about it, gives the novel more narrative backbone than earlier instalments. The story builds steadily to a vividly rendered apocalyptic scenario, and this proves to be the last showdown for several characters. The titular reference to "utopia" looks almost ironic in the face of this. The post-scarcity spaciousness of the series has an obvious utopian vibe, but this penultimate volume is haunted by very non-utopian concepts: the costs of things; the past's inescapability; the encroaching end. We're not there yet, but it won't be long now. * Adam Roberts's Bete is published by Gollancz. To order The Long Utopia for [pound]15.19 (RRP [pound]18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Adam Roberts.