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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Space Between Worlds
by Micaiah Johnson
The Space Between Worlds is a stylish and emotional debut, full of rage and hurt. The high-concept scifi is travel between parallel universes, with two catches. First, we can only travel to universes that are pretty similar to our own. And second, if you're alive in a parallel universe, going will kill you. This means that sheltered PhD types make poor candidates. You need someone who's dead almost everywhere else to make a good traverser. Someone like Cara.
And that's where this book shines, in the depiction of Cara and her social reality. Her own Earth is a planet divided, between the steel and glass city-arcology where she works, and the mudbrick toxic slum of Ashtown where she was born, lived, and mostly died. The racism, classism, and Foucauldian biopower of the setting isn't so much subtext or text as supertext. Cara wants to fit in, want's to be secure, want's to be valued for something other than dying a lot. And it isn't going to happen.
The basic form of this book is the confession, layers of secrets and crimes. The first confession is that Cara isn't the original. Our narrator is from Earth-22, an imposter for the dead prime. Prime was a good girl raised in a harsh environment. Cara-22 was the abused partner of the Emperor of Ashtown, a warlord named Nik Nik who commands a force of gangsters driving Mad Max death machines (in a utopian detail, almost all universes have banned guns and edged weapons. Even in hell, they kill up close.) Prime died on her first journey, and Cara-22 has been impersonating her for six years.
When a routine journey to Earth-175 goes wrong, Cara comes face to face with an alternate Nik Nik, and learns that her job as a traverser is based on another layer of lies. The genius who invented traversing is another warlord. His sole power over traversing is maintained by corporate buyouts on Earth Prime and assassinations across the multiverse. As Cara's dreams break apart, she drives a bargain of monstrous revenge.
The Space Between Worlds is stylish, polished, and thoughtful. It upholds the highest values of science-fiction, to hold a mirror of estrangement to our own world and say, "This is who you are, but it doesn't have to be like this."
And that's where this book shines, in the depiction of Cara and her social reality. Her own Earth is a planet divided, between the steel and glass city-arcology where she works, and the mudbrick toxic slum of Ashtown where she was born, lived, and mostly died. The racism, classism, and Foucauldian biopower of the setting isn't so much subtext or text as supertext. Cara wants to fit in, want's to be secure, want's to be valued for something other than dying a lot. And it isn't going to happen.
The basic form of this book is the confession, layers of secrets and crimes. The first confession is that Cara isn't the original. Our narrator is from Earth-22, an imposter for the dead prime. Prime was a good girl raised in a harsh environment. Cara-22 was the abused partner of the Emperor of Ashtown, a warlord named Nik Nik who commands a force of gangsters driving Mad Max death machines (in a utopian detail, almost all universes have banned guns and edged weapons. Even in hell, they kill up close.) Prime died on her first journey, and Cara-22 has been impersonating her for six years.
When a routine journey to Earth-175 goes wrong, Cara comes face to face with an alternate Nik Nik, and learns that her job as a traverser is based on another layer of lies. The genius who invented traversing is another warlord. His sole power over traversing is maintained by corporate buyouts on Earth Prime and assassinations across the multiverse. As Cara's dreams break apart, she drives a bargain of monstrous revenge.
The Space Between Worlds is stylish, polished, and thoughtful. It upholds the highest values of science-fiction, to hold a mirror of estrangement to our own world and say, "This is who you are, but it doesn't have to be like this."