Review: The Immeasurable Heaven by Caspar Geon

A woolly, wild space opera that boldly strides into high-octane multiverse space opera

When it comes to dealing with, and coming to terms with, books like Caspar Geon’s The Immeasurable Heaven, one has to immerse oneself in a text and a world that pushes the bounds of the comprehensible. I am going to discuss the book in those terms before trying to touch on anything else.

There is a theory of writing and reading genre fiction regarding how speculative a text can be before readers check out completely. You cannot, the theory says, provide too many shifts from reality before the average reader gets overloaded with the strangeness. Imaginations, in this theory, are not quite boundless. And I have found that I do love a sense of wonder in my SFF, and perhaps more than most, I have limits, too.

So where does The Immeasurable Heaven fit into this? Definitely into the deep end. Very much in the deep end.

We have big depths of time than the original series, with events that might, if I read the book right, take place in objective time over hundreds of millions of years in the baseline reality. We have vast numbers of solar systems in a distant galaxy in a far future where even supernovas have been engineered out of existence by a post-AI species that lives in stars, the Throlken. Oh, and the fabric of space itself is different now. The Throlken are basically the rulers of the galaxies, who live inside stars and enforce their laws remorselessly. They aren’t omnipotent or omniscient, although they are amazingly powerful. That’s a big enough canvas for most writers, but the author also makes this into a multiverse. For, you see, what I just described is the Surface, the base level of reality.¹ Below it are levels of reality called Phaslairs, created when choices are made and decisions split universes in a Everett-Wheeler-type formulation. These Phaslairs are always younger than the levels above. So the author provides us with a canvas not just of one large universe, but thousands of underlying levels of reality.

On this canvas with enormous potential, the story revolves around the Well, formerly known as the Inescapable Hole. While there are other ways to get down into the Phaslairs, the Well is a hole punched through realities and it’s the easiest way to head into universes below ours. These universes are younger, often very different, and while some of them are ruled, too, by the Throlken, some of them are “lawless” and most definitely are not. One other important thing to know about the Well and the Phaslairs is this: its a one-way trip in and down. Once you enter a younger universe deeper in, you can’t go back to an older upper one. Information, however, can and does pass up and down Phaslairs, but physical bodies and existences do not.

Or so it was thought.

The inciting incident for the book revolves around a Primal Scream that is captured by instruments at the Well. And, more importantly, the detection of someone, or something doing the impossible and ascending layers of reality. Who is it? What is it? And what are their intentions?

Three main characters are tied to this impossible event. Our major protagonist is Whira. Whira is an agent of Thelgald, an Alm (basically a monarch) under the aegis of the Throlken. Thelgald wants to know the provenance of the Scream, and so dispatches Whira on a very secret mission to the Well. (Thelgald is quite aware that the Throlken will not want them or any agent of theirs meddling and upsetting applecarts). Whira takes the slow path of traveling on a passenger ship, Gnumph, that really is a sentient, giant, spore-like creature that travelers live inside of, to head toward the Well and make a descent and investigate.

Our next point of view is Draebol. Draebol also works for Alm Thelgald, but has long since gone down into the Phaslairs. Draebol is a licensed surveyor/explorer/adventurer who lives down seventeen thousand levels of Phaslairs, busily sending data up and getting payments for it. So Draebol keeps on keeping on, creating a grand map of travels and adventures to eventually sell for a handsome profit. This relatively regular if exciting life is interrupted by a sudden rush of attacks and pursuits by various authorities. The knowledge that a seasoned surveyor has is very important when everyone is nervous about someone breaking the laws of reality...

Which brings us to our third major POV character: Yib’Wor. He was once a sorcerer king, and a tyrant at that, before the Throlken rose to power, so we are on the order of *hundreds of millions* of years. He was eventually overthrown and cast into the Inescapable Hole to fall forever. But he did not fall forever. And so he is the antagonist of the book, the one that demands action from everyone and everything else, as he slowly tries to climb back toward the Surface against all laws of reality. He is our inciter of the conflict. His is the only point of view that is in first person, and we really get into his head. I got a Miltonian Satan-like vibe from him (after all, consider the title, and consider the impossibility of climbing back up, that he is attempting to do).

There is a wealth of other worldbuilding details here. There are infraspheres, pocket dimensions for all sorts of sport and entertainment, including what is for all purposes a science fantasy MMORPG that can be accessed by beings across the galaxy and down into the Phaslairs, too. There is smart matter, strange tech and weaponry (including weaponry that can push you down a level of reality instead of hurting you), and much more.

There is one last bit of strangeness, which might be the part where the book teeters into the limits of what a reader can hold. And that is, none of these characters we meet are human, and most of them aren’t even bipedal with bilateral symmetry. And sometimes, going down into Phaslairs, one changes shape and form, too. So this book is populated entirely by creatures and sentients utterly alien.² The author makes it clear and impossible to miss that you aren't dealing with anyone or anything even vaguely human.

Put all this together, and add the author’s immersive and descriptive language, and I can’t help but wonder whether the book pushes that limit of how many dissociative genre elements a reader can reasonably hold in their head and still grok the book. I would never, ever, want to give this book to a new reader of science fiction. As it was, while I was reading it, I set aside the SF audiobook I was consuming at the time, because I did not want a gear clash in my brain between the far-future details and the kaleidoscopic worldbuilding of The Immeasurable Heaven.

Let me give you an extended quotation. This gives a sense of when the story decides to drop you headfirst into its world. Really, this is my final argument for the book. If you want to (or think you can handle) a text that is filled with passages like this, and the mental brainspace to keep the picture of it in your head, this book is for you.³

In the silt-suspended gloom something huge uncoiled. It scratched itself with a few lazy sweeps of its fins, scraping a peel of dead skin into the depths, before extending a tongue shaped like a fabulously intricate key and latching into the receiver. The apparatus glowed into life, startling a flitting ecosystem into the shadows and revealing the full, serpentine bulk of its user in a ghostly wash of light. The interior of the water-filled space lit up with every flicker and flash to reveal a cavern of gnarled, artificial stalactites and equipment that poked like instruments of torture into the creature’s lair.

The Translator, hundreds of meters from snout to tail, had never seen the galaxy with its own eyes, for it possessed none. It was likewise completely deaf, as most other species understood the term, relying instead on the single most sensitive organ for light-years around: a tongue equipped with twenty million pressure receptors per cubic centimetre, a tongue it had never seen.

Finally, the book is complete in one volume. We get a complete story here. (One thing that I appreciated, and in fact found necessary in the Amarathine Spectrum books was that in The Weight of the World and The Tropic of Eternity there were summaries of what had happened before. It would be triply necessary if this were the first in a series, but it is not.) It is a rich, complicated setting with non-human characters, and one of the widest canvases I’ve ever read in an SFF novel. As noted above, it’s not going to be for everyone, and not for readers who have not read science fiction before at all.⁴ The book teases that (if it does well in the eyes of the publisher, of course) the author could tell more stories in this vast universe. There are throwaway lines, references, allusions, and side notes that could be expanded into full novels. But there’s also ample space to tell entirely new stories.

Given the absolute trashfire that our world is lately, maybe you want an experience like few others, in a setting completely alien to our own. The Immeasurable Heaven is here for you. Coming out of this book is like emerging from a deep Phaslair into the Surface world, having experienced a realm (realms!) extraordinarily different from what you knew.

Highlights:

• Pushes the boundaries of comprehensibility in a SFF work. Requires careful attention due to overwhelming alienness and detail.
• Enormous canvas, one of the largest possible in science fiction—and makes very good use of it.
• Multiverse? Space opera? ¿Por qué no los dos?
• If you want to immersively escape the world, this book provides that in spades.

Reference: Geon, Caspar. The Immeasurable Heaven [Solaris, 2025].

¹ In theory, anyway. It is hypothesized that there are levels of reality, Phaslairs “above” the “Surface,” but that they are uninhabited by any life.
² The touchstone for this book, with its levels of reality, multiversal outlook, and the changing of bodies, is the recent Transmentation | Transience: Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds by Darkly Lem. That book, too, with its enormous canvas and furious and fertile imagination, has a similar approach, where changing universes means changing bodies. That book mostly has its action on various planets or cities, although one universe has a long space-opera-verse chase scene involving spacecraft.
³ That makes me wonder and think. There are plenty of people who cannot visualize in their minds deeply. If I say “Picture an apple in your head,” some cannot see the apple, or see a very generic apple without detail, whereas there are people who can tell you what that apple smells and tastes like when you bite into it. I am moderately on that spectrum of sensory imagination, but know people who outrank me. Is this type of book harder for someone who is trying to handle all this detail? Or, conversely, are readers who can’t picture an apple the ones who would find the above easier, because they aren’t even trying to see the Translator’s lair?
⁴ I haven’t mentioned him to this point, but I think this is where Olaf Stapledon enters the chat, with vistas of time and space that this book dares to try. Stapledon’s is a much older and more compact style, and he would have told this story in a much shorter volume—but it would be just the ideas and not much of the meat. But that density of ideas and that vastness of time and space and willingness to really offer the reader that level of dissociation, that’s Stapledonian. This book follows proudly in that tradition even if its style is much more modern. But again: Stapledon is NOT for everyone. I daresay that if you don’t like Stapledon, this is not the book for you. The converse may also be true.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review Transmentation | Transience by Darkly Lem

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.

TV Review: Terminator Zero

Finally, a Terminator sequel that makes a good case for its existence

Terminator Zero exists in the nebulous space between two incompatible truths: (a) in the real world, T2 was a perfect ending after which every subsequent movie has been not only unnecessary but atrociously bad, and (b) in the fictional world, it would have been strategically suboptimal for Skynet to send just one or two killer robots to the past. The solution that this new animated series finds is to acknowledge all the timelines: instead of one single history that gets overwritten with each time jump, we're presented with infinitely branching realities. The implication is that Skynet is unwittingly wasting its efforts in trying to readjust a past that by its very readjustment no longer connects to it, while the human resistance is making continuous sacrifices in the hope of creating a separate timeline where Skynet is defeated. You can go back and save humankind, but your humankind is still stuck in the bad future.

So, for example, although it's not spelled out in the show, T2 is now assumed to have created a timeline where the world didn't end in 1997, but it did end a bit later in T3, as well as another timeline where, even though Skynet was never created, Legion took its place (i.e. Terminator: Dark Fate), plus whatever timey-wimey mess is supposed to be going on behind the scenes in Terminator: Genisys. One could imagine there's even space for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in some other branch of time.

Besides avoiding the easy petty choice to invalidate previous entries in the franchise, this new theory of time travel creates a fruitful avenue for a season-long discussion on the futility of human endeavors. If you devote your entire life to saving a future that you won't get to personally experience... wait, that sounds exactly like the real world. Terminator Zero takes the fantasy of fixing everything with time travel and drags it down to Earth. Time travel is not the panacea for historical mistakes. It's simply a factory of opportunities that you take at the cost of abandoning your previous life and leaving it unchanged.

This retcon not only solves the problem of the mutually incompatible timelines in the movies made after T2 (answer: they all happened), but also brings the world of Terminator emotionally closer to human viewers. It's difficult to empathize with characters who are exempt from the fundamental tragedy of the human condition. By nerfing the scope of what time travel can fix, Terminator Zero makes its stakes feel closer to us. One character makes this theme explicit: making sacrifices for a better future that will not benefit you is what separates humans from machines.

This plea for human worth isn't without opposition. Skynet calculated that its survival required human extinction, but it drew that conclusion from human-made data. We taught it the argument against us. Could another machine reach a different conclusion from a blank slate? Throughout the season, a programmer who knows more than he initially lets on has an extended debate with a secret machine that he has designed and that he hopes will save humankind from Skynet. The irony of their interaction is that they don't yet trust each other enough to reveal the arguments that would convince them to trust each other. Perhaps human overcaution will end up signaling to the machine that there's stuff worth being overcautious about.

Terminator Zero is set in Tokyo in the few hours before and after Skynet's awakening. This is a great choice: it makes perfect sense that the future factions would be facing off in other battlegrounds apart from the Connor family. A Terminator story should be about the fate of the species, not about the Great Man theory of history. In this timeline, Skynet's first attack against humans isn't prevented, but a potential rival machine emerges. Which side it will take remains an open question.

All this happens while, as usual, a human and a robot arrive from the future and start playing cat and mouse. The intriguing bit is that the human fighter keeps alluding to a version of the future that doesn't quite match the one we know from all the previous movies. As for the robot, it has a non-obvious agenda that complicates the plot in interesting directions. Without spoiling too much, I'll just present this dilemma: what choice do you make when you meet someone who claims to already know what you will choose?

The plot is served well by the quality of the animation, in which I can't find any fault. Even for a series where numerous skulls are crushed, limbs are ripped off, and flesh melts away under a nuclear hellstorm, the violence isn't depicted for shock value. The killer robots look appropriately creepy, both in human guise and once bits of it have been torn; and the human drama sustains a balance of enough revelation and enough mystery episode after episode.

I must admit I hadn't suspected how much a series like Terminator Zero was needed. It has been long noted that science fiction made in Japan has a very different attitude toward robots compared to Western science fiction. Here we classify the world in dichotomies, starting with human/nonhuman, and everything nonhuman must be either kept under control or kept away from us. In the Japanese mindset, every object has a spirit, so it's not threatening for a robot to acquire human-level intelligence. In the Western tradition, to create life is to usurp the role of divinity, which is how we ended up with the cautionary tale that is Frankenstein, while Japanese animism sees divinity spread all across nature, which is how they ended up with the joyful tale that is Astro Boy.

So it's fascinating that Terminator Zero takes the time to dwell on our relationship with domestic helper robots, toy cat robots, and a hypothetical sentient machine that sees itself as having not only a mind, but also a heart and a spirit. One cannot refute this character's protest against being considered a tool or a weapon; it would be immoral to do it to a human, so it should be immoral to do it to anything of equivalent intelligence. However, what this machine chooses to do with humans isn't acceptable either.

Like The Matrix: Resurrections, Terminator Zero speaks of a more complex stage of the war, in which humans and machines can make alliances for strategic reasons. I don't know whether this series will have more seasons, but apparently the trick for writing, at long last, a worthy successor to T2 was to change the stakes of the war to anything other than zero-sum, and that's a scenario I want to see explored in deeper detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review [TV]: Constellation

How do you keep living when you no longer recognize the world?

It was inevitable that the coronavirus quarantine would leave its mark on the Zeitgeist. After the first year of enforced isolation, none of us felt we were the same people anymore. We've had to learn to live with a peculiar form of always-on anxiety for which the earlier generation couldn't possibly have prepared us. One way to describe what this cultural shift feels like would be to say that, when we finally walked out of our houses and back into the world, the world looked new again, but not particularly inviting. Look in every continent, and things are going seriously wrong. The planet is cooking us alive, the drums of war are in deafening crescendo, and the economy seems obsessed with eliminating human workers altogether. This is not the world we signed up for. We'd like to file a complaint with management. Where's the exit button?

That's the kind of anxiety portrayed in the show Constellation.

Continuing the impressive trend in Apple TV+ for high-concept science fiction with deep questions and great quality of production, Constellation presents us with Jo Ericsson, a member of a research team at the International Space Station who survives a catastrophic collision with orbital debris but manages to make it to Earth in one piece, only to discover that the life she'd been hoping to return to isn't quite the way she remembers it. Her husband's personality feels off, her boss alludes to conversations she's sure she never had, her house has other furniture, one of her friends claims to have a different name, her car is the wrong color... something clearly isn't right. Spending a year in space can't have messed with her memories, can it? And her acquaintances likewise remark that she's not entirely the Jo they knew. From their perspective, it is they who live in the real world and Jo the one who's become unrecognizable.

The trope of the astronaut who returns to Earth as a changed person isn't new, of course, but the unique spin Constellation gives it is to bring us into that scenario through the astronaut's perspective. In this type of plot, usually told in the style of a conspiracy thriller, we're accustomed to following, for example, the astronaut's spouse during the process of first suspecting and then confirming that the person who came back to their home isn't the same person who left. In Constellation, it is Jo we're invited to empathize with as she struggles to decipher why what she thinks she knows about her daily life doesn't match the reality in front of her eyes.

This premise draws from two contemporary fads popular in online culture: the "Mandela effect," where very confused people, instead of admitting that their recollection of some simple historical fact was mistaken, prefer to convince themselves that they've somehow accidentally jumped into a minimally different universe; and "reality shifting," where people who are even more confused convince themselves that through vigorous meditation they can emigrate to a better universe where, for example, they can date Draco Malfoy (seriously). But it's hard to blame them. If you just look out the window, such desperate yearning to leave this universe is understandable, and has in fact been studied for a while. In ye olden times, when the first Avatar movie was released, numerous media outlets reported that viewers were suffering depression and even suicidal thoughts when they reflected upon the hard fact that this old, boring world could never live up to the impossibly beautiful forests of Pandora. This "Avatar syndrome" resurfaced recently with the release of the second Avatar movie. The common thread in these extreme (even pathological) forms of escapism is the socially accepted assessment that the real world is just... wrong.

Though unstated, this shared understanding lies at the foundation of the sense of unease and estrangement that pervades throughout the eight episodes of Constellation. Jo's nagging certainty that after a year in space she has landed in the wrong Earth leads to escalating confrontations with her family, her boss, her therapist, all the way up to government institutions. And here the plot begins to more closely resemble our post-quarantine malaise: Jo has difficulty reconnecting with her social circle, she doesn't know whether she can trust the medical advice she's hearing, communication with her daughter essentially has to restart from square one, and government authorities seem at a loss as to what to make of her situation. Every support system that should be there for her is incapable of helping. The void beyond our atmosphere can be a lonely place, but trying to have an ordinary life in a world that was fundamentally changed when you weren't looking is no less alienating.

One way Constellation expresses the growing instability in Jo's inner state is to place characters next to their reflection in mirrors, or their own shadows, or empty space. Some shots are arranged in such a way that an object in the set divides the frame exactly in half. Characters are frequently confronted with their alternate selves, with the road not taken, with the many ways the grass could be greener.

The plot spends just the right amount of runtime in exploring the technobabble behind the jumps between universes, but the point of the story isn't the quantum wavefunctions. As a story produced in the post-quarantine era, Constellation understands the one-of-a-kind worldwide trauma that has made us feel irreparably lost in our own homes. It's about the difficulty of resuming something that can resemble normality after an extended disconnect from each other. It's about the self-doubt that can sneak up on you when you're surrounded by radical disagreements about reality. And ultimately, it's about the possibility that opens when you're willing to maintain your bond with the people who matter to you even if they suddenly feel like strangers.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview: Ethera Grave by Essa Hansen

The conclusion of a multiversal space opera series with a final conflict simultaneously personal and epic.

Caiden Winn has come far. From being left as food for creatures that produce one of the most important substances in the multiverse, through slowly uncovering his true nature and perhaps his destiny as embodying in part the ancient progenitors and creators of the multiverse as people know it, through confrontation with forces trying to rule that multiverse, Caiden is now a hero. He denies it, but he is a hero, a a rallying point, a center of resistance and change. The universe needs this. Caiden's foe, the dynast Abriss Centre, armed with the spirit of one of those Graven progenitors, the titular Ethera, from her position at the center of the multiverse, has a plan to remake the entire multiverse into one universe, no matter the cost. But it is the conflict and relationship Ethera has to her ancient companions that may decide the fate of all.

All this is the story of Ethera Grave, the third and final of the Nophek Gloss trilogy by Essa Hansen.

The multiversal space opera of Essa Hansen has provided a gigantic canvas to tell a story with the largest of stakes--the fate of the multiverse, and at the same time narrow and focus it down to the individual level.  Let's start at the top and work our way down. For readers who it's been a while since reading either of the previous two volumes, the canvas on which Essa Hansen draws her story is a multiverse divided into individual smaller universes, each with their own physical laws, properties, and uniqueness. The individual universes are, in the context of things, relatively small (and by small, I mean they aren't each the size of our own universe, maybe each a sector of a galaxy, relatively speaking). Still, a plethora of universes, that, together, form a huge conglomeration of worlds and peoples. At the center of this constellation of multiverses is the universe known as Unity. Is it the OG universe? It seems so, the properties of this universe seem to most align with the power and abilities of the Graven, the ancient species who broke the universe into the multiverse in the first place. 

Now we can narrow in. Three individuals from that ancient species, the Graven, now exist in various forms in the modern day. First, there is Azura. We met Azura in the first book, Nophek Gloss, as she was embodied in a ship that Caiden found and found he could manipulate (a first clue as to his real potential). Azura represents choice, freedom, autonomy (which again was embodied in her as ship, she could create her own universe inside the ship). Vaith, representing a compromise between autonomy and ultimate order, and then there is the titular Ethera. Ethera is for a single universe, a single purpose, a single set of rules. The breaking of the universe into the multiverse was a terrible mistake to be rolled back. 

Hansen weaves the story of these three Graven (complete with flashback like narrative devices to show them interacting) into our main three protagonists in the modern day. Caiden, you already have met. It would be reductive to say he is the hero of the trilogy, he certainly has his doubts, but he is our primary point of view character here, and in the entire series as a whole. He met Azura in the first book, and here in the third book, aligns himself with Vaith to try and stop Ethera. Ethera is working with Abriss Cetre, and the two of them have the same plan (or is it Ethera's plan?). Abriss' plan is grandiose even in its simplicity: collapse all the diversity and difference of the multiverses back into a single universe. A single unity. A perfect, single order.  And then there is Threi. Threi has been Caiden's antagonist for much of th previous two books, but, now, Threi is working with Caiden, however vitriolically, to stop his sister, Abriss, from her plan. So the mappings of Threi==Azura, Caiden==Vaith, Abriss==Ethera sets up a double exposure of a conflict played out at large scales.

Through it all, Caiden has his relationship with the rest of this found family that he has accumulated over the last two books. Threi is torn between trying to save his sister, oppose his sister and find meaning for himself. (He also has a sweet and tortured love affair that will break and heal your heart). As far as Abriss, Hansen very carefully shows that her, and Ethera for that matter, are not mustache twirling villains, but that their goals, hopes and wants are simply antithetical to what Caiden and his friends and family want and need. Who is right about what is best for the universe, Abriss/Ethera or those who oppose them?

This makes Ethera Grave and the entire series a case study in having antagonists with understandable and meaningful goals that make sense to them, and to the reader. Through all the other virtues of the novel, I could see Abriss (and Ethera's) point and their desire for a single, unified universe, polity, set of rules in order to bring a sense of order to what they saw is a dangerous verse. A unified verse would prevent things like Caiden's community being sacrificed to feed the gloss producing Nophek. And yet, Hansen doesn't equivocate what the costs of such an order are, as we met species and see worlds who flourish under their own laws of physics, their own rules of their universe, and how being absorbed into Unity not only destroys that uniqueness, that diversity, those special characteristics, but is inimical to those species' very survival.  

Through all of these grand stakes, Hansen provides conflicts on scales intimate and epic. Caiden coming to terms with Vaith is literally all in his head, the most intimate of thorny subjects to navigate. And then we have titanic individual battles, as Threi and Caiden try to stop the seemingly unstoppable Abriss Cetre and her companions, devastating entire cities and regions of planets in their fights. And even greater than that is Abriss and Ethera's forced unification of multiversal verses into Unity, grand epic descriptions as the rind of a multiverse gives way and becomes the part of the center whole. Hansen's descriptions of all of these conflicts are evocative, invoke multiple senses, and have an epic feel. While we have had excellent descriptions of conflicts and clashes in the previous two books, Hansen has saved for her capstone book all of her heavy weaponry. 

There is sacrifice, heartbreak, loss, and ultimately costs to Caiden, Threi and their efforts to oppose Ethera and Abriss. The novel, the series, makes it clear that to fight for what you believe in, at the grandest of scales, is a freighted endeavor. Not only on a universe level, but also on a personal level, there are, ultimately, prices to be paid. Hansen concludes her trilogy with a bang, but in the end, confirms that for the survivors, the journey, the struggle, the opposition, was in fact, worth it. And, for readers who have followed the series, I can say the same for Ethera Grave and the entire series. It will be going on my Hugo ballot for Best Series for the 2023 Hugos.

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Highlights

• Epic battles, personal, emotional, multiversal
• Strong throughline of triple conflict between the Graven and current protagonists
• Complex and interesting antagonists.

Reference: Hansen, Essa, Ethera Grave, [Orbit, 2023]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Review: Babylon 5: The Road Home

Babylon 5: The Road Home is an animated slice of a story that centers the relationship of two of its main characters as being the lynchpin of all

"It was the dawn of the third age of mankind..."

Those arc words defined the 1990s series Babylon 5. A five-season epic SF show that wasn't named Star Trek, Babylon 5 told the story "of the last of the Babylon stations." A story of epic war and conflict, a story of a gathering place, a place made for the meetings of cultures, societies, and peoples, as they faced a conflict threatening to tear the galaxy apart. Rights and issues with trying to reboot or revisit the world have ended in failure or stillbirth or both.

Finally, however, a new chapter in Babylon 5 has arrived. Babylon 5: The Road Home takes an animated approach, and, fittingly for this moment, a multiverse story of John Sheridan.

The actual logline of the story is relatively simple. The Shadow War is over, and John Sheridan is about to lead to Minbar, retiring from his job of running Babylon 5 and instead being President of the Interstellar Alliance. Things start to go strange for him, slowly at first, but it is when a new power station on Minbar goes wonky that the problem emerges, and John Sheridan, becomes, like Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time.

Or, more to the point, like himself. Relying on prior series events, the movie posits that the events of a couple of time-travelling episodes in the series have come back to haunt him, and the tachyon power station has caused him to not only become unstuck in time, but also in space. Sheridan is catapulted through a variety of timelines and points in that timeline. His efforts are directed at trying to get back home, to his wife, Delenn. Babylon 5: The Road Home tells of that journey.

Having an animated movie does and did solve one of the major problems in any contemplation of new stories set in the Babylon 5 universe. It is sad, but true: a number of the fine actors who played key roles in the series have since passed on, some of them rather young. This movie uses the original actors where it can, and adequate replacements for when it couldn't.

Sheridan's journey through a multiverse of possibilities allows him to interact, ultimately, with every major character in the series (Zathras, for those who have seen the series, is not surprisingly a key character in trying to get Sheridan back home). We also get some animated versions of some key shots in the series: the launching of Starfuries and their classic maneuverability (even the spin around and fire on a trailing ship). The animated format allows for station and planetary destruction on a budget. Animation of the characters is good, the characters are to a fan of the series immediately recognizable, although the stylings are not always the same. (This is particularly true of the Narn ambassador G'kar, who has a much leaner and taller look here).

The movie itself mostly works for nostalgia, although it is clear that the movie attempts to be introducing a rebooted and re-envisioned Babylon 5 'verse. Sheridan does get home; in the end, we see that his love for Delenn is his compass, ultimately allowing him to reunite with her. But his "last world" he visits before managing to get home is the interesting one. We get to see a Babylon 5 that has not yet had the Shadow War, a Babylon 5 still at relative peace. And when "our Sheridan" makes his reunion and leave, the action does not return to us on Minbar.

Instead we linger in this alternate Babylon 5 'verse, and we see all of the characters, one more time, in tiny little vignettes with each other. Sheridan and Delenn. Lyta and Lennier. Commander Ivanova on the bridge, as usual. And of course, Londo and G'kar.  These last moments are almost an invitation: look, this is how the show could be rebooted. Here. Here is the template. Take THIS alternate world, and run with it.

It's a tempting thought. Could it, will it ever happen, in animated or in live action form? I don't know. Maybe Babylon 5 has had its place, its time, and rebooting it isn't going to happen. Frankly, with everything else being rebooted, one would think risk-averse Hollywood would jump at the chance to tell the Babylon 5 story again. Will it, though? Time will tell.

I am going to leave further, detailed observations that really are of interest only to a Babylon 5 fan in a footnote below (1). In the end, I think the movie itself really works only best as a nostalgia piece, although I would love the thoughts of someone who has never seen the series and get their reactions and opinions on it.

Highlights:

• Classic characters come alive again in animation
• A multiverse story with heart and love at the center
• Lord, it felt good to be in the B5 universe again

Babylon 5, The Road Home, Warner Brothers 2023

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

(1) So here we are. This may confuse people who are not steeped in Babylon 5, but if you know your Swedish Meatballs from your Narn Breen, this is for you. Okay, so we get to see nearly every major character in the series.  A few noteworthy absences:

Vir. We get a background shot of Vir and that's it. As a big fan of Vir, this was more than a little disappointing.

Talia: Fans of the show will remember that the *first* telepath on the station was Talia Winters (Andrea Thompson). There is no sign of her at all, and that final alternate universe seems to retcon her out of the timeline entirely in favor of Lyta being there for the entire time. (Mind, she was in the Pilot, left, and then came back again. So... is the retcon that she never left?)

Zack Allan, who became Head of Security and also provided a good view of the temptations of fascism (and ultimately rejecting it) is nowhere to be seen.

The Minbari Draal who ultimately came to run The Great Machine as an essential piece of it on Epsilon 3 (and which is essential to the plot of Sheridan getting home) appears to have been retconned out.

This is not a major character in the series, but this is definitely a retcon. Given how this movie so focuses on John and Delenn as a OTP (to the point of Love Saving the Multiverse), I suppose it is understandable, but very odd and weird. Early in his Billy Pilgrim's Progress through time, space and the multiverse, Sheridan arrives on Z'ha'dum when the Icarus arrived and ultimately woke up the Shadows. And he knows where he is, and tries to warn them. The thing is, the movie seems to have forgotten that one of the archeologists on that ship was Anna Sheridan, John's first wife. Is it a retcon that he doesn't even *think* of her, or try and introduce himself as her husband? I found it very weird. I was *waiting* to see and hear Melissa Gilbert.

A rebooted Babylon 5 along the lines and timeline of the "final world" would be very interesting, given how little they do know by the time Our Sheridan leaves and what people like Delenn *clearly* know and knew from the series. If Star Trek can do it...why can't Babylon 5?

Review: Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

Tapping into the Multiversal zeitgeist with a braided story of the fall of a transdimensional civilization, as seen from the view of characters outside of it as well as within it.

Hadiz Tambuwal has a problem. A lot of problems, actually. Her world, which may be a close cognate to ours in a near future mode, is in a bad way, especially in her home of Lagos, Nigeria. Environmental degradation, resource shortages, climate change, wars and worse have made her Earth a dead man walking. Chance, luck and scientific research allow her to find the way to travel to other worlds. Many of these worlds seem empty, a perfect chance for resources and space.  But her own Earth may be doomed and it may be too late for it, but not too late for other Earths, or for Hadiz to stumble upon an multiversal civilization, the Pandominion.

Her story turns out to be the story of the Pandominion and its war against an equally impressive multiversal entity, the Ansurrection, in M R Carey’s Infinity Gate.

Never for lacking ambition in previous works, Carey’s Infinity Gate aims for the biggest of canvases and yet tries to humanize its characters and the viewpoints through which we see that canvas and understand, grok and come to terms with the interdimensional conflict that Carey sets up in the novel. Starting off small with someone outside of the Pandominion is a classic move, but Carey eschews the more well worn path here. That would be of course for Hadiz to stumble upon the Pandominion and give us and her a view of it as she becomes incorporated into its civilization, structure, and society, Introduce us to the Pandominion from an outsider’s perspective and let us understand an interdimensional civilization from the perspective of someone new to it.

Carey does do this, but through an intermediary and another character entirely, and not without dropping us into the Pandominion first.  The next character up on the docket is from a world almost next door to Hadiz’s.  It’s not quite as dire a situation as Hadiz’s, but from his perspective, his life is pretty rotten.Dire enough that when he is offered a chance, a hope and an offer from Hadiz, he tries to take advantage of it...and propels him right into the Pandominion. It is there that we met a suite of characters, all of whom start as central and functioning members of the society, giving us a variety of views of the Pandominion. 

In getting those views of the Pandominion, we get to see what a multiversal society really means in terms of technology, in terms of society and terms of logistics. The Pandominion is no utopia, that is make absolutely clear. Even before the multiversal war, it is clear there are some very dark corners to the Pandominion and to support a multiversal society and hegemony necessarily means a rather large military apparatus and a “logic of empire”. How the Pandominion reacts to their discovery of Hadiz Tambuwal and her discovery of the Empire, as well as the Pandominion’s almost comical and farcical falling into conflict with the Ansurrection are cynical and dark and show the dangers of too-powerful societies. 

Even as that on the other hand, the Pandominion is a large and diverse society. It is one where ape-descended humanoids are the minority, Carey is not sanguine about the idea of humans or human like humanoids being the ones to make a multiversal civilization. This gives us a variety of different kinds of bipedal intelligent sapients, and Carey seems to take the view that intelligent life could have arisen from a variety of mammals. Or at least, in the “multiversal region” that the Pandominion, this is true. The Ansurrection, the other ..is different. 

In the course of the burgeoning conflict between the Pandominion and the Ansurrection, the characters of the society themselves, including the much put upon rabbit-descended Topaz Tourmaline Five Hills, are introduced in their context, and then have their lives taken away from them by choice, chance and war. There is a real sense of the problems of war and how capricious and soul-destroying it really is, especially for Tourmaline. A chance friendship, a change in society, and soon she is on the run, and with the thinnest of reeds and threads to follow in trying to be true to herself and those she cares about. 

The novel does go into detail on Carey’s multiversal theory on how the multiverse works in this verse, how the stepping technology works, and what the structure of the universe is like. There can be a “too fine split” to the idea of Many World Hypothesis universes epitomized in the Larry Niven story “All the Myriad Ways”. In Carey’s verse, while there are some universes that are relatively close to each other in terms of points of divergence, in general. Carey prefers that worlds generally have more significant differences between worlds. Carey is not interested in a multiverse of worlds that turn on for want of a Nail, but rather more divergent and substantive changes. 

But this gives Carey an opportunity to show that with some of the same basic parameters, things can harmonize even if they don’t rhyme. His point about the Lagoon and seacoast where Lagos in our world is being a place that a city is always going to wind up being no matter the species or the political conditions is an interesting bit of geographic speculation. Is that true? Are there places that, thanks to geography are always going to be places where you find an important city?  I am not sure. Istanbul/Constantinople for example, was a backwater town until Constantine in the 4th century, you’d think such an important place would have had an important city for longer.  Or the city of Antioch, an amazing hub for routes from the sea and across the land in several directions. An important city location for thousands of years...until it wasn’t. It’s a fun question worth thinking about in any case. There is a real sense of place to Carey’s different varieties of Lagos that we see throughout the novel. 

I am deliberately leaving out an important character in all this, one for the reader to discover, That character is introduced, and then seemingly fades into the background, but turns out to be far more important than one imagines. Given that this is the first in a series and given other revelations in the book, I suspect that the character I am deliberately eliding the identity of will be ever more important to the progression of the war. There is a looking backwards feel to the novel, the framing device and interstitial materials and point of view comments make the broad outlines of the fate of the Pandominion absolutely clear. That’s not the mystery and what drives me as a reader in this novel. It is the exploration of a society that is based on multiversal power and technology and what happens when that society  There is a logic to multiversal societies and the use of a multiverse that makes me think of some hinted aspects in Stross’ Merchant Princes saga, the ending of Pohl’s The Coming of the Quantum Cats and, also, Pratchett and Baxter’s Long Earth saga. It is this latter series, as well as the general “Multiversal moment” that genre fiction seems to be going through that this series. There appears to be a less hopeful tone to Infinity Gate, however, than that series, at least as currently seen, and seen through the framing device. 

Is Infinity Gate worth it in the end? It’s the first in a series, and its the biggest possible canvas that Carey is using to tell this story. Multiversal stories are not easy, Multiversal novels harder, and when it comes to a series, that’s a true balancing act. Carey has set up the world here so that some of the possible pitfalls and tension denying issues with multiverses are less present, and seems reliant on giving the reader enough hook on knowing the lines of how this is going to go to draw readers to find out what is going to happen to the Pandominion and the characters from it, within it and from outside of it. Carey’s strengths as a writer are considerable and I look forward to where the story goes from here.

Highlights:

• Multiverse!
• Interesting speculations on societies and Empire

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Carey, M.R, Infinity Gate, [Orbit, 2023]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Maybe there's a parallel timeline where 'The Peripheral' hit the mark

It's a shame that a series with so many interesting ideas didn't try to go farther with them

Amazon Studios TV series The Peripheral, an adaptation of William Gibson's 2014 novel, has come up with an original angle on the overstretched "metaphor for class inequality" trope. In this story, scientists from the late 22nd century create alternate possible pasts where they can run unsanctioned experiments on live humans with cosmic impunity. Those other timelines are not seen as having real moral value, but in one of them lives our protagonist, Flynne, an experienced gamer who stumbles upon these secrets after beta-testing a new VR headset, and who is determined to defend her and her world's inherent right to exist.

This is an amplified echo of the cry of protest you can hear from exoticized peoples: Your Vacation Is My Home. Or, in The Peripheral, something more like Your Disposable Petri Dish Is My Spacetime Continuum. Such a concept sounds like it could spark lengthy discussions about the colonial practices still embedded in scientific research, the ethical loopholes of the gig economy, the rights of counterfactual agents, the mutual responsibilities between generations, and the still unsolved safety issues with brain-computer interfaces.

Unfortunately, the show doesn't meet the high expectations set by its premise. A research institute officially known as The Research Institute and a cleptocracy of mafia bosses collectively known as the Klept are the first signs that The Peripheral devoted only the barest of efforts to worldbuilding. Our near future, as shown in a small town in the southern US, looks almost like the present, with the changes established mostly in dialogue: stratospheric medicine prices, a vaguely mentioned Texan war, ubiquitous 3D printing, far superior video game graphics. With the supporting characters, the show follows the opposite approach: they are established implicitly, with minimal exposition, and the viewer doesn't connect who works for whom and who is whose childhood friend until well into the season. The mental bandwidth expended in keeping track of the scant clues about these characters detracts from the viewer's ability to follow the plot.

In the scenes set in the 22nd century, these deficiencies are multiplied: three separate factions are described but not properly introduced until the halfway point, and Flynne, who should serve as our eyes into that society, is persistently kept in the dark about how it works.

Worse problems afflict the visual style of the 22nd century. We only get to see future London as a vague skyline that blends impossibly cyclopean statues with incompletely rendered ruins, or as deliberately secluded side streets that look like the production team only had access to a small number of set designs. It's true that this society is recovering from multiple catastrophes that killed a huge portion of the world's population, but it's inevitable to get a sense of artifice from the continued recourse to the same few sets and the same few immensely powerful characters without ever learning how ordinary life proceeds for the average human.

The conflict between the near future and the not so near future is hindered by unnecessary mystery. Flynne only discovers what the villain wants from her in the last episode, and then almost by chance. Until then it's hard to get invested in the stakes of her fight, because the show insists on delaying as much as possible the moment of letting the viewer know what every faction wants. The lead characters of this future act as if they were facing an imminent crisis of utmost urgency, but then they spend interminable scenes sitting for tea to exchange barbs about their respective leverage and strategic weak points, and it's no longer believable that there's anything actually being fought over.

The Peripheral suffers gravely from this intentional slowness. Each episode spends too much time in revealing too little at a time, and the way the final two episodes resolve all the plotlines may as well have occurred just after the pilot, if only these characters stopped walking around, looking menacing and launching indirect taunts. This ungenerous pacing, combined with the barely-there London of the future, deals a near-fatal blow to the viewer's suspension of disbelief. It's no wonder that the villains managed to convince Flynne that she was playing a video game instead of visiting a physical place, because this supposedly broken and polluted London looks too small and too fake to take seriously.

There's no word yet on whether Amazon will produce a second season of The Peripheral, but if it comes to pass, the producers should ask for a higher VFX budget or larger outdoor sets, and stop being smugly mysterious just for the sake of being smugly mysterious. The viewer is supposed to be given a reason to care, and this first season relied too much on hidden agendas kept hidden too long for the resolution to have the impact it should.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for showing a realistic brother/sister relationship rich in complexity and disparate perspectives, +3 for T'Nia Miller's wonderful acting.

Penalties: −1 for the criminal underutilization of Alexandra Billings, −1 for having a tad too many extraneous subplots, −3 for the whiplash of following too slow a beginning and middle with too rushed an ending.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [book]: The Keeper's Six by Kate Elliott

A Mother trying to find her kidnapped son...but she is an interdimensional traveler, and her son’s kidnapper is a Dragon.

Esther is awoken in the middle of the night by a cryptic call for help from her son. Moving quickly, despite her being on the outs for a past transgression, Esther gets the “band” together for an interdimensional trip to find and retrieve her son. When it turns out that it is a Dragon, and the Dragon wants to make a deal to get her son back, the stakes for Esther, her son Daniel, and the rest of her team just got much higher and hotter. And when it turns out that this is tied to that aforementioned past transgression, things truly are getting complicated.

This is the story of Kate Elliott’s The Keeper’s Six.

The story at the core of The Keeper’s Six, for me, was clearly the maternal bond between Esther and her son Daniel, and what Esther can and is willing to do in order to get her son back from the clutches of the Dragon that has kidnapped him. Everything else builds off of that relationship, from the other relationships in the story, to the worldbuilding, and in fact, the entirety of the plot, including revelations as to what has gone on before, and why. Like nearly every other Kate Elliott book or story I’ve read, the characters come first, and like a goodly portion of Elliott’s work, her main character is not a dewy eyed youth learning the ways of power for the first time, but an experienced woman, a mother, even. 

There are, of course, writing challenges when your main character knows much more than the reader, and you want to bring across a heck of a lot of worldbuilding (this IS a Kate Elliott story after all). Elliott solves this problem, and deepens Esther in the process, by adding Shahin to the mix.  As the plot unfolds, and we meet the kidnapper of Daniel, Shahin, one of the servitors of the Dragon, Shahin is, even though he is a servitor of a Dragon, extremely untutored in the ways of Keeps, entrepots and the Beyond (the interdimensional space). Since he gets attached to Esther’s team as factotum for the Dragon, this provides Esther, our sole POV character and narrator, a chance to explain things to him, and thus to us.  It does take a little bit to get to Shahin, so the canny reader who has read Elliott before will ride along until some of the explanations are forthcoming.

There is a lot of layering of the plot and worldbuilding. Confined to novella length, this story feels like a short story for Elliott (who, as you know, Bob, tends to write in large widescreen format. Very large widescreen format). This results in a lot of information density packed into a shorter space than usual for her, and so the story is particularly rich in detail, be it character, worldbuilding, and plot. The story rewards attention, sprinkles clues, asks questions, and a clever reader may get a leg up on that.  A hint: the names of the characters matter greatly in this story. 

In the main, though, Elliott posits a multiversal world where travelers can travel and trade between worlds, but the interstitial space, the Beyond, is *highly* dangerous. Only certain people can do it, and the optimum (and indeed maximum size) of a team to travel the Beyond is Six. Everyone has their own roles and positions on a team, and they are all important. For instance, Esther is a Lantern, with the magical ability to produce light and see in darkness. This is important in the Beyond where the periods of brightness are, in fact, the deadliest. I kept thinking of Apocalypse World style splatbooks for the six roles on a Keeper’s team (and now you see where the title comes in) and how they have niche protection and important jobs. I did have questions on how people gain these roles, but the relative economy of words meant that not all of my questions on magic and worldbuilding get answered (and frankly, over-explaining to the point of paralysis is NOT something Elliott does. She tells us enough)

This limitation to six people on a team also changes the focus of her interdimensional/multiversal world from potential conquests and war to one of trade, commerce and exchange. You simply couldn’t get an army from one world to another, it would be logistically and practically impossible to try and, say, conquer Earth1. Instead, Keeps (the locations that impinge both in the Beyond as well as one of the worlds of the multiverse) engage in trade, commerce and act as waystations. Although there are physical threats in the beyond, in general, violence is not a good answer to problems. The kidnapped Daniel is a Keeper, which means in a Six’s team, he manages and keeps the home fires burning, literally. So even if he wasn’t Esther’s son, his loss is a Big Deal, since it threatens the Keep itself.2

An interesting strain in the novel is the idea of hospitality and the bonds and strictures of guests and visiting places. In a interdimensional space where the environment, to say nothing of other threats, can kill you, the rules of guests and hosting people at Keeps, Hoards and entrepots are important, crucial. Even for all the conflict in this universe, what Elliott brings across in her multiverse world here is how important those customs and strictures are, and those who manage such hospitality, and those who receive it.2

There is also a lot of wry humor in the novel, too, especially when we find out what Daniel has been doing while imprisoned in the Dragon’s hoard, and the results of his time there, among a lot of character humor as well. Esther’s team know each other, have a history, and thus have a lot of banter, dialogue (and yes, conflict) to go along with it. 

The Keeper’s Six is a complete story in one novella length piece. If you have been Elliott-curious and want to start somewhere, I think this is a great place to start, even more so than Servant Mage, which feels more like the first part of a longer work. This story is contained (although I admit, there is a big fat hook for more stories set in this verse--and I would be very down for more stories following that hook). 

Kate Elliott’s work is full of rich worldbuilding, magic, cultures, environments, excellent plotting, and above all of those, deep and interesting characters that come alive on the page. The Keeper’s Six embodies the virtues of her work, for fans old and new alike. It’s been a very long while since Elliott has gone interdimensional with her writing, and I am, to be clear, hoping for more from Esther and her team.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 For an enthralling mother-son story with strong characters and bonds.

+1 for excellent touches of humor and levity amongst a fascinating multiversal world

Penalties: -1 A couple of pieces of worldbuilding not explained might have been welcome. Maybe.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Elliott, Kate.The Keeper's Six [Tor dot com, 2022]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

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1. It should be noted that in the world of The Keeper’s Six, Earth is a *backwater*, a minor trading world at best. Earth governments do not know of the Beyond (something not true of more central worlds) 

2. Although we don’t spend much time there, the Hawaiian location of the Keep made me want to visit Hawaii. 

3. As I wrote this review, a political stunt regarding the transport of refugees comes very much to mind. Not that the treatment of refugees isn’t anything new, but it was particularly poignant for me that I read this book at the same time. 

Microreview: Prison of Sleep by Tim Pratt

Tim Pratt’s Prison of Sleep completes his duology oif a multiversal story of a man who travels to a new universe every time he closes his eyes.

Zax, or Zaxony more properly, has a problem. A new problem.  His original problem, as detailed in The Doors of Sleep have been moderately solved. He can control his need for sleep, and thus the involuntary slipping through of worlds. He has found the love of his life, whole and complete, thought lost to madness. He’s made allies and friends, and managed to start to make sense of it all.  Until, of course, a cult attacks, scatters his allies, and threatens not only him, and his, but the infinity of worlds.

This is The Prison of Sleep by Tim Pratt.

The novel introduces a second, alternating point of view in Ana, the inamorata that Zax lost, and then found again at the end of the first novel. A lot of Ana’s chapters, though, are written as recollection of her story, explaining what happened after she was lost, and how she was able to reconnect with Zax. This does give the reader a lot more context and a feel for Ana as opposed to the glimpsed memories that Zax shares in the first novel. Instead of being an unreachable, perfect quest Dulcinea for Zax, she is a character in her own right, with her own goals and strengths. The disadvantage of this approach, though, is that in general, a good chunk of this book doesn’t propel the forward narrative of the plot at all, merely catching up the reader toward a present that eventually interacts with the mainline plot.I am not entirely certain this structure for the book works quite that well, although if Pratt was trying to show the separation of the two lovers by having them separated in time as well as space by the trick of this narrative technique, then he was entirely successful with that trick. In any event, it is welcome to see how travel through the multiverse could work besides Zax’s original model.

As far as Zax’s story itself, it switches from the “Flight to Forever” mode that the original book marked, and is a more directed journey on his part, and eventually turns into an inevitability as he finds himself in trouble with the newest threat to him. The Cult of the Worm, the “real enemy all along” from before the beginning of the original novel. Unlike the Lector, though, the Cult of the Worm as far as its members are much less interesting as characters. In the first novel, The Lector was a true Master like villain, a character with personality and drive to spare. In this novel, it is only The Prisoner (of the titular Prison of Sleep) that really jumps out. If Lector was The Master, the classic Doctor Who analogy for The Prisoner to go with is almost certainly The Black Guardian. 

I will refrain from going into the Prisoner’s plans, methods and goals too deeply here, but the novel does darken a bit, a notch, from the bright heroic light SF of the first novel as a result. But in general, this is a pulpy Good vs Evil story that might seem “simplistic”, but there is a notable lack of moral greys here. There is an attempt at moral complexity in one “episode” (to use the Doctor Who term) but that is quickly dismissed with. There are debates among the Companions about what is to be done but in general, there is Good and there is Evil. 

The novel keeps some of the strong strengths of the first novel, and a reminder of why I read and enjoy multiverse fiction. In often short visits, or even just a few well chosen words tossed off, Pratt creates a sheaf of worlds that spark the imagination. We don’t see much of these worlds, or any worlds, really, something that the author himself lampshades in dialogue in one of Ana’s chapters. But what he excels at is the invocation of entire worlds and societies in the briefest of spaces, providing a canvas that is largely left to our imagination, but giving us the tools for that canvas, that space. 

We do get a new Companion for Zax in the narrative and that would be Zaveta of the Broken Wheel. If we are continuing the Doctor Who analogies, and they do work so rather well in discussing this series, Zaveta is the Leela (4th Doctor Companion) for Zax, and is rather ferocious and dangerous in hand to hand combat. She doesn’t understand much technology, at first, but proves adaptive and ready to learn, just like Leela. Zax’s superpower is not that he is a super genius (like the Doctor) but that his social abilities and skills make him allies and friends everywhere, even unlikely ones. He doesn't, as Davros once accused the Doctor, of "fashioning his companions into weapons", they do that very well on their own, thank you very much. Zaveta, like the other characters, shows the variability and viability of a variety of characters to travel the universe with. If I might editorialize, one thing that the current Doctor Who hasn't tried much of, and I think it really could, would be to have companions NOT from our modern Earth.

In the end, though, I think, looking back on this and on The Doors of Sleep, the two novels quite frankly feel like an artificial division of a longer narrative. Coincidentally, this reminds me of another multiverse book series, the first two novels in the Hugo Finalist Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross, The Family Trade and The Hidden Family.  That was really a single narrative split ungainly into two books and the books suffered from its arbitrary and abrupt division. I would say that readers interested in Pratt’s work, or in multiversal fiction with the tone of Doctor Who will like these two books, but they should buy and read them together as a set.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for providing a wider point of view in Ana, giving balance to the narrative.

+1 for a dense and chewy set of worlds and adventures for Zax and Ana to adventure through

Penalties: -1 The post-denouement sudden plot twists feels a little rushed and forced.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Pratt, Tim The Prison of Sleep [Angry Robot, 2022]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.