How about a book review? I have been reading. Not a lot but some. Currently reading the fourth and Final? Long Earth book. One of the authors is dead, but he was prolific and there may be more books in the can. I find them to be okay, but just okay.
The benefit to this setting, a Long Earth, where a string of different Earths exist in a long string of billions is that anything could happen on any of those worlds. So one science fiction idea has the seeds for hundreds. The first Long Earth was interesting, it explored the possibility and the thrill of having another world an instant to the left and the right. Undamaged, unexploited and unchanged, where humanity never happened. Which is the divergence from the other stories of its like. No humans, but the same. No humans but ever slightly more different, ice ages, no ice ages, different climates, diffent evolutions, different extinctions, different geological histories; more differences further to each direction. Extinct civilizations.
The second book dealt with a war. War between the Humans and war between the sentients discovered in other worlds. What if dogs were sentient? What would a Dog Civilization look like? How would it react to humans, a great ape civilization?
The third book explored the fragility of our world when a natural disater occured on a human damaged world and there was no cushion to absorb the effects of the disaster and how fucked that world was, except they could relocate to any of ten worlds on either side and save the people. Something that if a similar horror happened here, we could not do. Reality check Humanity! There was also a space program in a distant Earth where Earth failed to form, ie easy trip to orbit and they went to Mars and explored the alternate Marses a paralel of Disaster Earth.
This last book explored alien invasion of Earth, but not our Earth, one 175M iterations away where humans had spread, a world of paradise with few enemies and world spanning forests filled with easy meat prey year round availible fruit and warm one season climates. What is the most likely alien visitor? All answered.
What is the end? It I think is the end, this book has been in the can for some nine months and one of the authors has been dead for six of those months. Perhaps the story will continue. This was likely Terry Pratchett's last book.
There have been other books with this theme including Charles Stross Merchant Prince series. Humans trading between worlds for technological differences to get wealth. Exploring that between worlds with severe tech differences like that between present day society and a middle ages kingdom what would the low tech world see of value? Weapons. The jumpers between worlds were initially these low tech cousins and their values and morality reflects their selfish ideas and ideals. They seek to solidify their power over their own people where they are most comfortable.
Later in the series anther world is added, one that is middle of the road between the two and a the two groups see different ways to exploit the new world, the modern society seeks to get wealthy by 'inventing' new technology and holding the patents, the manufacturing and the sales profit. A steam age world brought up to a modern world in a few decades bypassing the industrial dirty stage almost completely.
Interesting, but the novels start to get stupid. It happens in all series that go on too far.
Sliders the TV show from the 90s interesting but are all human centered worlds, the opposite of the Long Earth.
I like the Long Earth because it went along major geological and evolutionary changes. What I did not like was that it was only two directions to travel, East and West. I would have added Up and Down (future and past variations of e theme), North and South, (different historical choices like what if it were Hillary Clinton as president instead of Obama?) and every other variation, North-West and slight slope down, Hillary Clinton instead of Bill in a Female centered world where none of the recent Human variations went extinct; five sentient races, female dominated and google has not been invented yet . . ..
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