A rich, wide-angle look at a multiversal society and those who would seek to support, change, and undermine it
Multiverses. Multiverses are cool. I’ve always thought so. Be it the Eternal Champion of Michael Moorcock, the endless Shadows of the Amberverse of Roger Zelazny or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, multiverses are the biggest canvas a story can possibly take place on. But even so, we usually see the multiverse one universe at a time. If we are lucky, we get an Amber-like hellride (or think of the scene in Multiverse of Madness where Strange and Chavez go through a rapid succession of weird worlds, including the “paint” one). Or we get a multiverse novel with a few worlds, and only an implication of a wider multiverse. A sustained look at a full, widescreen multiverse seems elusive, in print and otherwise. What ends up being delivered is more often the idea of a multiverse than actually coming to grips with the breadth of one.
However, in Transmentation | Transience: Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds, Darkly Lem, a consortium of five authors, tackles their multiversal story using a rather wider focus, a wide-angle lens, showing us what life in a multiversal society, several of them in fact, mean in practice. It’s quite the ambition on their part to even give this a go.
Given the very complicated, high-level plot, describing and dissecting it could easily take the entirety of this review and then some. I will be brief, then, and move on to other matters. The novel is a story of conflict and contact between a large, dominant, multiversal society and a couple of smaller, almost satellite, multiversal societies, who seek to push advantage and destabilize Burel Hird, or at least slow its capacity and potential to annex other universes. As the long title indicates, the plot revolves around an assassination attempt to change the makeup of the People’s Council as a way to engineer social change, all coming out of a seemingly innocuous and accidental conflict at the beginning of the story.
There is much subtext and implication within the worldbuilding of the novel in terms of the dominant culture of Burel Hird, and that is where I want to begin. This is ultimately a novel about philosophies and theories of governance. At the center of it, we have Burel Hird, the titular Nine Thousand Worlds polity. We learn through the lenses of the wide range of characters (more on them anon) that Burel Hird runs on the power of bureaucracy. It is literally “government by committee,” in fact a whole lot of committees from the bottom all the way to the titular People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds.
Burel Hird is refreshingly depicted in its bureaucratic nature. The tendency toward monarchical or oligarchic structures is near total in fantasy, and is rather strong in science fiction even to this day. The lure of empire or imperium in science fiction, especially when one is dealing with polities that rule multiple worlds, is very strong indeed. The reasons why monarchies and empires are so often thusly used is a whole topic in itself, and perhaps for another time.
In any event, Burel Hird may be a hegemon, but they are not run by one person. Burel Hird is a polity that makes paperwork and procedure and form and function out of everything, and its sometimes ponderous approach has, in fact, gotten them a lot of political power... and a lot of dread from other, smaller multiversal societies, such as Withered Stem, Firmare, Of Tala, and Arcalumis. And we get a sense that there are others as well. And these smaller multiversal societies have their own unique social structures as well. This gives a fresh, multidimensional feel to the political setup of this multiverse: a hegemon with other significant players at (or sometimes crossing into) iits borders. Therein lies the potential for conflict, which kicks off the plot of the novel.
Speaking of borders, I want to examine the method of travel in this multiverse, since it is a rather uncommon one. To travel from one world to another is an interesting and complex process. You can’t just pick any world; it usually has to be one which is in alignment with the world you are in. Some people can transport themselves; some people, usually called movers, can transport others (and so have a lucrative job). In a bit of science fantasy, every person who can transport themselves or others has a particular way to “unlock” that power. For example, one of our point of view characters, Meryl, can transport themselves to another world by sustained singing. Others have odder requirements still. It makes me think of the Charles Stross Merchant Princes novels, where those with the ability to travel between worlds do so by seeing a particular unique pattern shape. I could totally see someone in this ’verse having that exact requirement. This mode of multiversal travel does allow for both “chokepoints” (the people who can traverse the multiverse for themselves and others) as well as more porous borders. Someone who can transport themselves on their own can in theory slip into another universe past any normal “customs” control.
The other half of this system is that people don’t precisely slip across worlds in their own bodies. Instead, they inhabit a body already existing in that universe (if you’ve been there before, or else it is created de novo for you). And when you go to another universe, the body you leave behind (called by a number of terms: proxies, hides, and others) more or less goes into a shuffling, base survival mode that is not precisely explained completely in the novel (although it does become a plot point). I think, from a 30,000 foot level, this is to prevent some potential hazards of this setup; finding, for instance, upon jumping into a body in a world that said body is a half a world away, or even a star system away, from where you expected or wanted to be, because your body in the meantime decided to take a trip to Mars. I am reminded of the movie The Thirteenth Floor, where the protagonists could enter the virtual reality sim, but those virtual reality people had had lives of their own they were living before you intruded in (in one case, for example, the protagonist finds he is in the middle of a dance competition that he has to get out of so he can do what he wants). There are some philosophical questions here, too, that are explored, and a point of plot and character revolves around this dichotomy that the authors set up.
In fact, philosophy and theory are a big part of this book. Yes, we have the main throughline of the assassination attempt (and who and why this is happening as a mystery). And there is even a multi-universe chase scene like nothing I’ve seen in multiverse fiction except for the late Iain Banks’s standalone multiverse novel, Transition. But the book is also very concerned with theories of government, responsibility, and action. And history. One of the very unusual aspects of this work is the framing device. At the beginning, the book you are reading is presented as a work of “speculative history,” that is to say, historical fiction. The framing speaks of the “transmutation” of Burel Hird, and the “Formation Saga,” and the limitations of their knowledge of the period they are doing their speculative history about. The framers themselves are of a academic bent, which explains the somewhat unwieldly full title. And yet, even in that, the title gives away a bit of what the book is doing.
In the meantime, I should mention the worlds themselves. We get a wide variety of worlds in this multiverse, some sketched in, and some in immersive detail. The worlds’ immersive details are nicely handled with all the senses, from a wide variety of cuisines and ways of eating, family and social groups, architecture and landscape, and also technology (one world has space travel in addition to multiverse travel, and so we get some time aboard starships as well). In keeping with that, the proxies can vary from world to world. While we mainly see humanoids, gender appears to vary from world to world, and although we don’t see it on screen, we are told of even wilder types of proxies out there.
And so we come back to the beginning of this review to look at this book again. It’s clearly not a complete work, it's the first a series, a part of a collective, and intended to be part of a spectrum of works, and in some ways, given its multiversal canvas, given the fact that this is a look backward to a history before the formation of a new multiversal state, one might even call this something of a creation myth for that multiversal society out of a number of prior ones in conflict.
So I come to a question that you might be asking at this point, and it is something that I thought as I read the book: Who is the audience for this book? It may be slightly controversial to express an opinion that a book is not for all readers, but when it comes to a book like this, I think that opinion is worth being expressed. The recent turn for a slice of SFF fandom to be enthused with books that run more on vibes than more explicit plots has shown that in spades—the reactions to cottagecore, and coffee shop AUs, and the work of authors in the mode of Tamsyn Muir are all expressions of this.
So who is the target audience for Transmentation | Transience: Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds? It’s a fair question. It’s a book for people who love multiversal stories, that much is obvious, but the target audience is somewhat narrower. People who like the idea of societies, civilizations in conflict, with heaps of worldbuilding in doses small and large alike.
And does it work for that audience? Since I consider myself part of that audience, I can speak to this. I think that the book works for that audience, and it is so sui generis that others might be interested in picking it up, but it may be a book you bounce off of. The book that I think of here that really compares is Laurent Binet’s Sidewise Award-winning alternate history book Civilizations. That book is a high-concept mixture of first-person accounts, poetry (including a Viking saga!), fragments of text and more. It's not for everyone. I know people who adore it, and people who bounced hard off of it. Transmentation | Transience is exactly like that. If you want a high-concept, ambitious multiverse novel at the highest of scales, and don’t mind an as-yet incomplete narrative, then, like me, you will enjoy the book, but if that doesn’t sound like your jam, this book is most certainly not for you. Like the aforementioned Binet, the book doesn’t *transcend* its subgenre and lane, but within that lane, it speeds along quite nicely indeed.
Highlights:
- This is what you get when you want Multiverses with a capital M
- Ideas, theme and societal conflicts aplenty
- Strong cover art
- Excellent in its lane rather than the general SFF audience
Reference: Lem, Darkly. Transmentation | Transience : Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds [Blackstone Publishing, 2025].
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
