The Space Between Worlds

I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.

This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same characters in different timelines where their lives had taken different paths.

The post-apocalyptic wasteland locale of this novel is split into the wealthy folks of Wiley City living behind a wall (literally and metaphorically the airquotes nice white people of this story), the religious Ruralites, and the survivors of Ashtown between them. Cara is constantly code switching and crossing borders, both locally and multiversally--she is pretending to be a Ruralite, is secretly from Ashtown, while she precariously lives in Wiley City (hoping to get citizenship). Thematically, I love how the book ends with doubling down on Cara's role as an intermediary between worlds.

This is a novel of alternates worlds set on post-apocalypse Earth. On Earth Zero, as he calls it, an inventor-entrepreneur safely ensconced in a gated city shielded from the harsh conditions of its planet has found a way to reach alternate versions of the planet. Crossing over is risky, so the task devolves to the expendable: the citizens of the wasteland ruled by warlords outside the city gates. Like Cara.

I’m not sure anyone could care enough for Cara, or her tech megalomaniac boss with a dark past, to carry a novel, were it not for a simple fact: This is not a novel of alternates worlds set on post-apocalypse Earth.

What Micaiah Johnson has created instead is something that takes the form and background of its genres and uses them for a meditation on inequality, violence – carried out on others and self-inflicted –, and all forms of exploitation, all couched into a simple, slow burn thriller. And as if this were not a small miracle alone, Johnson’s writing – wry, personal, sharp and human – will get you into the head of her protagonist in a way only the best can. This is more Red Harvest in speculative 21st century costume than anything you’d want to call “sci-fi”, and I for one can’t wait to read what she writes next.