Infinity Gate

Carey's Sci-Fi is aimed at a general audience, never assuming that the reader is already familiar with genre concepts. In this case multiverse imperialism and hive vs. individual intelligence.

Normally this would be frustrating for me, but in this case, it turns a tense high stakes novel into a cozy low stakes read, where you don't have to pay full attention in order to catch every hint. If you miss something it will be explained again.

M. R. Carey made me care about the characters and their role in the cataclysmic events to come and this carried me through the drudge.

The premise of the book: if the multiverse exists, and a new reality arises every time there's a choice to be made, that means there are infinite branching realities. And if one could easily breach the dimensional barrier, then one could have access to infinite worlds much like one's own, or very different from one's own--with infinite gradations of similarity and difference. When scientist Hadiz Tumbawal discovers a means to hop dimensions, that's her first thought, since her own Earth is dying. But the multiverse is already inhabited by the Pandominion, an alliance of Earths inhabited by bipeds of various lineages, and it turns out that even infinite resources don't obviate the tendency towards conflict.

As he often does, M. R. Carey explores the nature of machine consciousness vs organic consciousness, even suggesting that machine consciousness could evolve without being first created by an organic consciousness. In which case, what even is "organic"?

Personally I don't care much whether Carey gets the science of multiple dimensions or evolution correct--the result here is that you have multiple characters who are, essentially, human-animal hybrids. There's an intimidating cat-woman soldier, a gruff bear-man convict, and a brave bunny-girl student, in addition to the tradition ape-derived human species. It's fun, and I can't wait to read the second book to find out whether Carey does indeed create a universe(s) where machines arise from the muck of primordial life on Earth just as organic life once did in our reality.

Maybe it's my prejudice against multiverses and transdimensional travel, but despite the spectacular world building and polished narrative of this absolute unit of a first volume, I never felt this story. There's a soullessness to it that I feel bleeds in from the very concept of knowing for each of these characters there are potentially tens? hundreds? nearly indistinguishable, in the universes next door. If feels underexplained why these specific ones are the ones we follow, why these matter more than all the others, why world changing, one-in-a-million events happen to these, while the others, with one extremely minor exception, don't make an appearance at all.
If it was less hefty I might consider picking up the next one, but as it is this felt to me like too much book for not enough progress. YMMV

Fast multiverse combat adventure with a bunch of setup for... well, I'm a bit worried about whether this ever went anywhere beyond each next scene, there's a lot of incongruity in what we're shown to care about and what is plausible once the setting simultaneously covers one vs all and all vaguely-humanity vs all synthetic creation.

In the near future, Earth is collapsing under famine and ecological and political struggles. But the focus of the story is not on these. It’s on Hadiz, a brilliant woman at a top research facility in Lagos, Nigeria. She discovers how to travel between different universes, at first as a way to try to save her version of Earth, but when it comes to be too late for that, instead she has to pivot and figure out how to make an escape from her home to one of the other versions of earth.

In the process, she ends up having to set free an AI from its normal constraints in order to gain its help. This creates serious implications down the line that she doesn’t have time to contemplate, but you get the feeling will drastically impact the plot later (and it does).

But in the meantime, Hadiz makes all sorts of amazing discoveries about the other versions of Earth, which are amazingly diverse. She discovers that for every different way that things could have gone, for every random thing determined by quantum physics, the universe splits. There are almost infinite universes out there.

When she travels, she stays in the same location on earth as where she left. It’s a different earth, a different version of Lagos—or the land there at least; most of the universes don’t have life. But some do. Unknown to her, there is a whole coalition of hundreds of thousands of worlds, known as the Pandominium, and they regulate and control the travel between worlds which she is unknowingly encroaching on. All of this you learn within probably the first 1/5 of the book.

The exploration of other Earths is fascinating. The Nigerian culture is a refreshing experience, and then there’s the romp through all the versions of Earth that exist in a multiverse where there are branches at every possible random choice in the chain of causality that stretches all the way back to the Big Bang. It’s breathtaking.

When looking at a very similar Earth it’s interesting to see all the little variations and trace lines, connecting the dots gradually of how one thing could have affected another, resulting in larger diversions from our own reality.

And then sometimes we look at ones that diverged massively and those are also very interesting, especially looking at the way that sentient life could have developed from a different non-ape-like species.

And then there is other life out there that is very fascinating…being vague to avoid spoilers but I will just say that it’s super interesting.

As the story unfolds, there is a great pan-dimensional conflict unfolding. There’s all kinds of prejudices of organics against machines and vice versa, carnivorous people groups against herbivores, and so forth. There’s politics and intrigue and conspiracies. Carey launches us onto an ambitious, grand ocean of worldbuilding, and demands that we swim. Fortunately, he also guides us into the deep water gradually, step by step. I consider this a great case study for myself in how to gradually introduce the reader to a vast world that the author has built.

And then, our main characters have their own conflicts that are much smaller in scale but as the plot progresses, ends up being entangled in these much grander conflicts in interesting ways.

There’s also a whole section of the book with its own planet that we focus on with people very different from Homo sapiens and an awesome character…unfortunately it’s hard to talk about any of that without feeling like I would be ruining part of the experience of reading that firsthand.

This book also has very relatable antagonists to the point that I find myself rooting for them and then remembering that hold on, if they succeed, that’s going to be very bad for the protagonists who I care about even more! That’s really good.

There are so many things this book does well. There’s very memorable and likable characters, there are truly tough villains, nobody is an idiot, the setting and plot and characters are all interwoven, so many things.

This book also has the distinction of having the most interesting military subcultures that I’ve read, maybe ever.

There’s also a great sense of wonder. The book starts off feeling a little bit more like hard science fiction with just enough explanation of physics and such things that it helps you buy into the premise but then the book becomes so much more.

Gosh. And just the fact that all of this amazing setting and worldbuilding is revealed primarily through action, through stuff happening in the plot. This is definitely one of my favorite works of science fiction. Ever.

The notion of whether machines could be considered alive is also explored quite intelligently in this book, but again done so by the plot pushing the conversation forward…I love this book. There is so much in here. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series! I need it now.