"The Pandominion: a political and trading alliance of a million worlds. Except that they're really just one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an A.I. threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they'll eradicate it by whatever means necessary. Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth's environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel, a secret that could save everyone on her dying planet. It leads her into the middle of a war on a scale she never dreamed of. And she needs to choose a side before every reality pays the price."--Provided by publisher.
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 …
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
lots going on, either too precious or too late for the AI debate.
3 stars
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.
Some interesting ideas about the evolution of intelligence (both biological and artificial) across different realities, I liked it, but there was a bit much military sci-fi for me to truly love it. Would read book two.
