The Long Mars

April 28, 2014
The third Long Earth installment (after The Long War) sees humanity spreading out across infinite parallel worlds, with several key figures trailblazing in different ways. Commander Maggie Kauffman leads an expedition to catalog hundreds of millions of Earths, many of which prove far stranger and less hospitable than imagined. Sally Linsay is recruited by her father to explore the alternates of the newly-discovered Long Mars in search of intelligent life. Joshua Valiente encounters the emerging Next, a new breed of superintelligent humans raised in Long Earth, whose development is bringing them at odds with baseline humanity. These first two threads offer up fascinating and inventive takes on planetary development, though they fly by at dizzying speeds. The third feels too much like a conventional “us vs. them” plot. Nonetheless, Baxter and Pratchett remain in fine form, their collaboration producing another thoughtful page-turner.

June 1, 2014
Third in the series (The Long War, 2013, etc.) exploring the idea that alternate Earths exist and can be visited simply by "stepping" into them.The discovery of the Long Earth by folks with a natural ability to step, and its subsequent opening up to everybody by means of a simple device, resulted in a diaspora. The original Earth, known as Datum, still has its troubles, and this time, the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone explodes to catastrophic effect, hastening the dispersal of Datum's population. The building of airships equipped with rapid-step devices means various Earths thousands or millions of steps from Datum can be reached. U.S. Navy Cmdr. Maggie Kauffman receives a commission to explore beyond Earth 200 million and in the process discover what happened to a previous expedition that never returned. The inventor of the stepper device, Willis Linsay, invites his daughter Sally, a loner and a natural stepper, to join him on an expedition to explore the Long Mars-where, he deduces, somewhere among the alternate Marses there will be intelligent life. And Lobsang, the supersmart AI who generally keeps an eye on things, suspects the emergence of a superior species of human. These highly intelligent individuals call themselves the Next, refer to regular humans as dim bulbs, tend to antagonize everybody and seem to originate in a particular location on one of the distant Earths. Foreseeing an inevitable conflict, Lobsang asks natural stepper Joshua Valiente to investigate. For series fans, the technique is familiar enough: a sprawling, meandering narrative whose purpose is less to amaze and entertain than to inquire about humanity itself and how attitudes and approaches to existential questions might or might not change.Panoramic and fascinating, if sometimes vexingly discursive.

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May 15, 2014
The Long Earth is under tremendous strain due to the eruption of the Yellowstone volcano on Datum Earth; Sally, Joshua, and Lobsang are all involved in the rescue work to some degree or another. Sally's father contacts her out of the blue and invites her to join him on an expedition to the Long Mars. Of course, he has an ulterior motiveand the consequences of his obsession are going to be far-reaching. Navy Commander Maggie Kaufman, along with her crew and a select crew from China, is on an expedition to the farthest reaches of the Long Earth, on which they'll make quite a few earth-shattering discoveries. Joshua's focus is on the children of Happy Landings, the Next. They're essentially post-human, and that makes normal humans fear them. The confrontation seems inevitable, especially after some of what Kaufman and her expedition discover. This is a solid piece of old-school science fiction, with a modern political bent; the exploration of both the Long Earth and Long Mars is well played. Long Mars in particular is an excellent piece of world building. High Demand Backstory: Two big names in the SF world will bring readers into the library asking for reserve slips.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)