Very nice book. I enjoyed it as much as I have the first book, which is very much :-) ( )

Good, but it's suffering from sequel drag by the fourth book of five. I can't remember clearly the events that happen in the book, but I found the "Next" obnoxious, and there are now too many characters to follow, so the book keeps jumping between viewpoints.

Explosive ending, though. Still don't really understand it beyond it being people somehow transcending reality. ( )

467 ( )

This is probably the best of this series so far, but maybe not for all the right reasons. Previous books tend to have 3-4 plots and like Charlie Brown every time you end up disappointed as none of them end in a satisfying manner.

This book has the advantage of not having ANY definite plot until the 3/4 mark. Coupled with so many time skips/jumps its really hard to look ahead anyway. So just based on not having any plots theres less room for disappointment :P .

Surprisingly when the 3 or so plots do finally appear in the final quarter one of them actually does manage to have a satisfying conclusion, although i still had MANY, many questions about some of the details.
And the other two plots where so ridiculous that i quite enjoyed their awfulness... i mean one of them turned into the movie 'Jumper' for 5 mins, which was crazy.. before disolving into nothing like most of this series plotlines.
And another thread joined with the main plot to have, i kid you not, Jesus turn up and save the day.. i... laughed.. no.. i guffawed, it was one of the dumbest things i've ever read :lol .

The best moment of this entire novel was actually half a page from which the title is derived, of course it went nowhere, but the idea of the Long Utopia, was a very interesting and terrifying one.

So yeah... finally one actually satifying conclusion, two of the weirdest plot decisions ever made, some interesting ideas and one book closer to finishing this disjointed mess of a series.

P.S. I hate the cover. I've used some of those free 'make your own bookcover' programs on the net and so many of them look like this cover. So cheap looking. ( )

Three books in, you'd think we might have been able to dispense with the world-building activities. I confess to having grown less interested with each passing installment of the Long Earth series: The first intrigued me with the novelties of and possibilities inherent in the central conceit (people can "step" sideways into what are essentially parallel earths, with just slight differences between one and the next. Over dozens, hundreds, thousands and millions of steps, however, those differences can loom quite large). The payoff wasn't there in the first novel, but I assumed as the cosmology built out more, that feeling would dissipate.

Nope.

Instead, each new story has indulged the uge to introduce yet more "novel" mechanics and contrivances, to just straight-up skip long stretches of "insignificant" time (where there are no novel inventions propagating, and thus saving us from having to read about the "characters," what shaped them, and other such dalliances that only get in the way off our fictional science, thank you). This is no different, where now we set upon a world where you not only can step sideways, you can also step forward and backward, and there's a Dyson sphere and ...

It's all too much. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the full third that was given over to the early history of a Victorian British secret society of steppers, its incogruity and total disconnect from the rest of the story went a long way toward proving to me that this really would be better off as a series of short stories presented from different authors (a la the Afterblight Chronicles) rather than a series of novels. ( )