Faith and Family in Once Upon a Time

This fall I re-watched all of OUAT to get ready for the new, Frozen-themed season that just finished on Sunday, which confirmed my love-hate of the show*.

I love the intertwined fairy-tale mythology. But I hate the dialogue, which borders on inane. Example: in one of the initial showdowns between the Evil Queen and the Charmings, the Queen interrupts the wedding of the Charmings to basically say "I'll ruin your happiness." Promises promises, Regina. It's your basic ho-hum Evil Queen platitudes made barely passable by Lana Parilla's scathing looks and deranged smile. As she walks away, Prince Charming hurls a blade at her back and yells . . . wait for it . . . "Hey!"

That's the line the actor was assigned. "Hey!" And it's not a funny awkward, "Hey! I have a really great comeback but I haven't thought of it yet!" moment. That's literally all Charming has to say to the woman who has threatened his life and the life of his beloved countless times, and who just ruined their special day* . . . "Hey!" It's like, instead of cursing him to a lifetime of loss and danger, she just ran off with someone's purse.

Moving on: I am a big fan of the complicated nonlinear narrative, where watching the show becomes an exercise in puzzle-solving to test even the best memory. I can't even count how many times I've had to google Cora's backstory again, to make all the pieces fit together, but they do! And it's delicious! But I hate the lazy episodic plotting which relies way too heavily on deus ex machina, usually in the form of some previously unmentioned magical artifact which happens to save the day.

The kick-ass female leads are . . . well, kick-ass. You've got Snow, a great tracker, rider, and fighter; Regina, mother of all devastating curses and necklines; oh, and before the show even begins, Emma is a friggin' bounty hunter who don't take no crap offa nobody. But this win for feminism (which, at this point, is still countercultural enough that it needs to be mentioned) is balanced out by the general tenor of the show, which is actually pretty conservative in its values.

Which brings me to this season, which is, despite the obvious commercialist pandering in the use of the characters from Frozen, pretty good. For one thing, I finally have evidence that the writers are capable of good dialogue; the character of Anna from this season gives a pitch-perfect reading of the Frozen character, with all her verbosity, quirky insights, and insatiable curiosity. If they can nail that, surely they can phase out clunkers like "Hey!" and "Never bring your heart to a witch fight," right?

This season of OUAT also has the strongest actress I've seen on the show so far. Don't get me wrong, I love me some steely-eyed Jennifer Morrison. But Elizabeth Mitchell as Ingrid blows me away. She blasts through the terrible dialogue of the show like a giant snow-plow of nuance, sarcasm, and staring-contest earnestness. I love her.

The thing that really struck me as I rewatched the show was its all-American conservatism. And I don't mean that as a political stance, but in the sense of Norman Rockwell traditional American values, specifically its emphasis on family and faith.

That OUAT is all about family should surprise no one who has watched even one episode of the show. Almost every main character on the show is related somehow. And most of the conflicts that guide seasons are familial, as well--mother/son, mother/adopted mother, mother/daughter, daugher/estranged parents, father/estranged son, sister/sister, sister/sister/sister, etc. Despite all the family chaos, one of the recurring messages of the show is that "family never lets each other down." You'd almost think you were watching Arrested Development, except that these characters are all so earnest in their belief in family and I don't know what their stance is on breakfast yet.

There's nothing wrong with a TV show underlining the importance of family, but family isn't all it's cracked up to be, either. In modern-day America, a "family" is not just a collection of people who happen to be related by blood, but on OUAT, family members who have known and distrusted each other for years suddenly develop deep affection for each other once it is revealed that they are related. And family can and does let you down; in fact, being part of a family can really suck sometimes. This truth is easy to find in the show's source material; in the original Grimm fairy tales, it's not Snow White's stepmother who seeks her death, but her actual mother. The AV Club puts it this way:

OUAT’s commitment to family seems almost pathological at this point. Emma is a spiritual, perfect-match sister to Elsa and her aunt. Because everyone in Storybrooke must be related to absolutely everyone? Does this make Snow White Elsa’s aunt? It’s all sorts of confusing, and pointless. Especially when family often has its own downsides: Anna’s dark side rightly points out all of Elsa’s nasty behavior outlined in the “Do You Want To Build A Snowman?” song from the Frozen movie; although we know why Elsa abandoned her newly orphaned little sister, a simple explanation for little Anna would have been nice.

This belief in family is so pronounced, so central to the characters' worldviews, that it amounts to a kind of religious faith. Not faith in God, necessarily--God is never mentioned--but the show's version of God, which is Hope and Righteousness. Every "good" character is distinguished by their ability to hope when things look bleak, and by their adherence to good actions. These actions themselves are undefined but often fall within Christian morals and standards.

For instance, there are very few suggestions of pre-marital sex in the present-day action. Both Belle and Snow wait until they are properly married--or, in Snow's case, until she remembers that she is already married to her estranged amnesiac prince-in-another-dimension husband--for there to be a suggestion of a bedroom scene. This also doesn't really jive with the original fairy tales, in which sex features heavily. How does the witch figure out that the Prince has been visiting Rapunzel? Oh, it's when Rapunzel's pregnancy starts to show.

This prudishness isn't the case for the Evil Queen, though; if there's one thing you can say about Evil Queens, it's that they don't wait. In the first season, the Sheriff (RIP Sheriff) is her bang-buddy. In the most recent season, she has some crypt-sex (what's crypt-sex, you ask? Some new Internet phenomenon? Nope. It's just what it sounds like--sex in a crypt.) with her married boyfriend. But even then, she has the decency to be embarrassed about an unbuttoned blouse.

I was interested to see where this latent faith-emphasis would go when this season introduced the idea of the Book with a capital B. Apparently, this is the master text of the stories that everyone has been living out, and it has an author who holds everyone's fate in thrall--who, essentially, makes decisions about who is right and wrong and who gets to enjoy their lives. But the show surprised and pleased me when it subverted this clunky, obvious reference to the Bible and to God in Episode 9, "Smash the Mirror, Pt. 2." Instead, Regina and Mary Margaret have what amounts to a theological discussion. Complaining about the unfair nature of their world, Regina pokes holes in Mary Margaret's relentless faith and hope, and instead of getting defensive, Mary Margaret acknowledges that nothing is black and white:

Regina: Whenever you need help, it magically shows up like Henry's book.

Mary Margaret: I believe that when you do good, help shows up.

R: Your wishes are rewarded; mine are crushed.

MM: I refuse to believe that happiness is impossible for you, and yes, you may be sleeping with a married man, but so have I.

R: I've done far worse.

MM: Which doesn't mean you can't earn forgiveness, a chance at grace. I have to believe that.

R: If you do good hoping to be redeemed, is that really good?

MM: You know how selfish and shallow I could be as a child; you know what I've done since. You've literally seen my heart; you know it's not untouched. You are not all evil and I am not all good. Things are not that simple.

R: Well, whoever's guiding this seems to think it is. You're the hero, and I'm the villain. Free will be damned; it's all in the book and we both know how that plays out.

MM: Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't matter what I believe. What matters is that you do.

What I love about this exchange is manifold. First, let's give props to the writers for finally referencing the spot on Mary Margaret's heart, a thread that has been largely left unexplored up to now. I also love the use of the religious language, like grace, redemption, and free will. The quote "You are not all evil, and I am not all good, things are not that simple" is what this show should have been doing a long time ago: challenging and flipping these archetypes, leading these characters to seek autonomy from their own roles*. I'll admit, we've seen it to some extent already with Regina and with Gold, but the characters themselves keep throwing around lazy labels like "hero," "savior," and "villain" like they're candy. This exchange finally shows us the characters themselves unpacking these terms and a hint of what this show could be if they would rely a little more strongly on the darker messages of original fairy-tales: that life isn't fair, that human relationships are dangerous and messy, that "happy endings" are complicated, and yes, Virginia, that "magic always comes with a price."

*What's with my love/hate thing? I think it turns on so strongly when something has the potential to be so good and yet it is mediocre. Robert Jordan is probably the best example of this, but I feel it pretty strongly for OUAT.

*Snow does have a "my special day!" meltdown later, which is great and proves that weddings turn everyone, even people blessed with preternatural kindness and good nature, into monsters.

*It's soooo metaaaaa.

The House of the Four Winds: Shoddy plot and no romance

Do you ever read a book and wonder how it got published? Or read an established author and think, "Don’t they understand basic story-telling?"

The House of the Four Winds, by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory, starts innocently enough. Princess Clarice of the Duchy of Swansgaarde must go out and seek her fortune because she has eleven sisters and a brother, and the Duchy cannot support twelve royal dowries. Clarice is a master sword fighter and intends to make her living as an instructor. First, however, she seeks adventure on a merchant ship, disguised as a man named Clarence. The ship is captained by an evil lout, Captain Sprunt, but Clarice/Clarence falls in love with one of the ship's officers, Dominick. After the crew mutinies against the wicked Sprunt, they set sail for an unknown destination whose coordinates are provided by a magical amulet that Sprunt carried with him at all times. The amulet directs them to the House of the Four Winds, a pirate haven. The witch queen of the pirates, Shamal, enchants Dominick, bringing him under her will and forcing him to seek the Heart of Light, a source of unlimited magic in a dangerous location on the sea. Clarice struggles with her secret identity while trying to help Dominick get out from under Shamal's control and save the crew. 

The premise of the novel has some basic flaws, like the fact that the King and Queen of Swansgaarde can't support their twelve daughters just because they have a son. That's some Jane Austen shit right there. It makes you want to suggest that, perhaps, there is a middle ground between providing twelve royal dowries and just giving your daughters a moderate sum to live on just in case, let's say, they don't feel like exiling themselves from their home country/castle and disguising their identity and seeking employment in a field that could feature on an episode of World's Most Dangerous Jobs. I mean, how about just providing a regular dowry, since Clarice is going to marry a sailor anyways? Also, Lackey and Mallory use adverbs like they're going out of style. Nearly every dialogue attribution was paired with a "crisply," "mildly," "kindly," "moodily," and "quellingly." (Yes, quellingly.) But I was willing to overlook these in favor of what I hoped would be a fun fantasy/romance. 

And The House of the Four Winds did have some neat elements. I am always a fan of women-in-disguise stories, pining-after-your-pal stories, and stories that occur on ships in general. I liked that Swansgaarde was set in a sort of alternate Europe, complete with clear counterparts to Russia, Africa, Spain, and England. In this world, London is called Albion and the river that runs through it is the Temese. This provokes some interesting questions. Is the House of the Four Winds, impossible to locate unless you have a magical amulet, located in their version of the Bermuda Triangle? I wanted to find out more about the people that live in the various lands mentioned. What are the differences and similarities to our world? And how has magic shaped the history of this alternate world?  Unfortunately, these ideas aren't given any traction and the story continues as if the world Lackey and Mallory have created is just any other fantasy world. 

The main characters--Clarice and Dominick--are likeable enough, if stereotypical. They are noble and chaste. Good for them. The villains, however, are comically bad. Sprunt picks on everyone on the ship, including his cabin boy whom he has savagely beaten. He drinks too much, is dirty and smelly, and eventually turns out to be a pirate. Also, his name is Sprunt, which sounds like it came from a Charles Dickens novel. Likewise, Shamal is vain and power-hungry. She doesn't really care who sees her displays of magical force or her bosoms, which she displays to Dominick. We, the readers, are supposed to hate her for this, especially since Clarice, in her disguise as a man, has no means of seducing Dominick with her bosoms. 

The biggest drawback of The House of the Four Winds that I take issue with is the undeveloped plot. It seems like it was put together on a wing and a prayer, with the authors deciding at random what events should take place. For instance, in the chapter when Dominick and Clarice visit the House of the Four Winds, the pirate council can't seem to decide how to treat their visitors. They greet them kindly, proceed to bait and threaten them, and then decide to let them go if Dominick will agree to seek the Heart of Light. When he chooses not to, Shamal bullies him into it with magic. Every line of dialogue is confusing and unmotivated, and I continually felt as though I was being spun around. Perhaps that is the effect Lackey and Mallory wanted the scene to have on their characters, but I expect a light read like this to be relatively straightforward from a reader's perspective. 

Other moments of dialogue also seemed needlessly opaque. When Dominick anguishes about whether or not to tell the crew that he is under Shamal's control: "'Is it you who keeps the secret, Dominick?" Clarice asked boldly. "And not . . . another?" Another what? Another person keeping the secret that Dominick is ensorcelled? That’d be you, Clarice—the only other person who knows. Or are you suggesting that there’s another secret, such as the fact that you are a woman? Clearly (as the ellipses indicate) this is meant to be a pithy, suspenseful moment--you know, the kind that would appear in the movie trailer accompanied by significant glances. But it doesn't make any sense! 

The final conflict itself is disappointing. [MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD] First Shamal's faithful manservant, Gregale, turns into a giant sea serpent, saving the day by eating his former mistress and protecting the ship and its crew from the other sea serpents, of whom he is the king, because why not? ("Why not?" could be the subtitle for this book). This would have been cool if it had been foreshadowed earlier in the book. Shamal could have easily gone into more detail when describing the dangers of seeking the Heart of Light, such as, I don't know, the fact that it is surrounded by sea-serpent infested waters. This would have heightened the tension of their journey and would have been an easy solution, even at the editing and revision stage. But instead the existence of the sea serpents, and Gregale's position as their king, came out of nowhere--very deus ex serpenta.

The most annoying part of the climax is that we NEVER SEE the Heart of Light. The store of mystical energy which Shamal seeks--we don't get a glimpse of it. The sea-serpent fight is over, the sailors find a bunch of unrelated treasure, yippee, everyone’s rich, and the Heart of Light remains the elusive mystery it always was. Even Clarice recognizes the ridiculousness of this: "I wonder what the Heart of Light was. I wonder what Shamal would have done with it if she'd been able to gain it." She goes on to speculate more, but it only draws attention to the fact that . . . hello, we've been hearing about the Heart of Light this whole time, and warned of its dangers, and wondering about Shamal's powers, and in return we get nothing.

And I really mean nothing. Because the primary reason I read this was for the romance. I can read good fantasy any old time, but I read this because it was a pirate romance. I need me some swashbuckling, sea monsters, and sexual tension. We got the first two, but the sexual tension was lacking to the point where, when the couple finally gets together, I was angry. "What? That was it? He didn't even say he loved her!" I wanted Dominick to have some confusing urges towards “Clarence”—some heated glances, or lingering hand-clasps—but in absence of that, I wanted the revelatory moment to include a kiss, a declaration of love, sweeping violins. Instead, he basically said, "I thought you were a boy, so I didn't expect anything more than friendship with you." Words to melt a woman’s heart, no doubt. It's certainly no "You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you ... etc." 

Actually, can someone just write Pride and Prejudice again, but set it on a ship? ‘Cause I would read the heck out of that. 

*This review originally appeared at FantasyLiterature.com, where I gave the book 1 star.

The Wheel of Time and Women

As anyone who has heard me go on for an extended period about the Wheel of Time series my boyfriend Wil can tell you, I have strong opinions about the Wheel of Time books, created by Robert Jordan. On one hand, I can't stop reading (and re-reading) them. On the other hand, they're sorta terrible.

So, unlike the time when I promised to review every classic Disney movie and then didn't, I'm going to write a series of posts explaining why the Wheel of Time books are simultaneously so good and so bad, addressing issues ranging from characterization and prose style to Jordan's take on race and gender issues.

Today's post is about women in the Wheel of Time. 

White Tower by Rob Christianson

Women are crucial to the series, as individuals and in groups. One of the most compelling inventions of epic fantasy is the White Tower of the Aes Sedai, which blends all of the raw magical and political power of the Bene Gesserit with the wide-eyed wonderment and growing pains of Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they train at Hogwarts. The Aes Sedai are a group of women who have received training in channeling, which means manipulating elemental forces to alter the world. Because of these powers, they are feared and/or revered across the world. Their headquarters and training ground, the White Tower, has three and a half thousand years of history behind it, and several important prophecies mention its role in the coming apocalypse, the Last Battle.

Basically, it's a huge all-girls' school-slash-abbey for training in magic and world domination. Which. Sounds. Incredible.*

Jordan has spent a lot of time fleshing out the Aes Sedai and the White Tower, giving them rules that both make sense and contribute to the plot, nuanced political factions within the tower, a diverse reputation across the various lands, and lots of cool gadgets. Their history is just as important a part of the Wheel of Time as the history of Rand al'Thor himself (the legendary savior called the Dragon Reborn) and the end of the series makes it clear that they will continue to guide the world even after the Last Battle. They are so central that you could rewrite the entire series just from the p.o.v. of the White Tower and its members, and not really lose a lot of plot. (IMO, that would be a better series, but I'll talk more about that as we go.)

The Aes Sedai are just the most prominent group of women influencing events in the Wheel of Time. They are joined by the equally impressive, charismatic Aiel Wise Ones, the Kin, and the Windfinders and Wavemistresses of the Atha'an Miere. 

Individual women in the Wheel of Time are also strong, brave, powerful, and important. I'm hard-pressed to think of any of the major female characters who only serves as a prop for a male character; they all have complicated inner lives and motivations.*

Picture by Seamus Gallagher

My favorite (everyone's favorite?) is Egwene al'Vere, who is basically the BAMFiest BAMF of all time. She's accomplished and talented. She faces danger when she teaches herself how to dreamwalk, works hard when she trains as an an Aiel Wise Woman while she's training for the White Tower, and puts up with no shit from anyone when she becomes the youngest Amyrlin Seat ever. She also has great inner strength, a reserve which she draws upon and intentionally deepens whenever she encounters difficulty, such as being manipulated by older counsellors in the Hall of the Tower, being captured by enemy forces, or tortured by rival Aes Sedai. 

But Egwene is not just a bad-ass woman, with the hardness and emotional emptiness that often accompanies that stereotype. Jordan lets us see her insecurities, her vulnerability, her growing sense of purpose and calling, as she struggles between her personal relationships and her duty as Amyrlin Seat. 

So . . . all of that sounds great, you say. Where does Jordan go wrong?

While his women are awesome, strong, fully-realized characters, he also plays on the most overused, banal gender stereotypes imaginable to create them. For instance, the idea that women are super dramatic, emotional vomit machines.

A great example of this are the Aes Sedai. One of the hallmarks of this group is that they have great emotional control. Their faces are smooth and give nothing away, an affect which is very intimidating for any Muggle-types treating with them. We are told this fact about them many times. So, that's how they are in action, right?

Oh yeah, EXCEPT for literally ANY TIME they are "on screen," when Jordan can't wait to tell you how much drama was going on and how shocking it was to see the famed unreadable Aes Sedai displaying emotions by any number of verbal or physical tics such as: gasping, crying, staring daggers, making a face, yelling, snarling, cursing, smoothing a skirt, twisting a skirt, bunching up your fists in a skirt (lots of skirt-related drama), etc. Even the WoT Wiki recognizes this, as it defines women as: "People who sniff, stare, smooth their skirts, and fold their arms under their breasts, and other stuff also, but mostly that."

Nynaeve by Jeremy Saliba

Nynaeve's ever-loving braid pulling is the most extreme example of the emotional-vagina syndrome in the Wheel of Time. Nynaeve is already supposed to be a pretty high-strung person, ("even for a woman," I hear Jordan saying from Epic Fantasy Heaven right now) but whenever she gets mad, she pulls and tugs at her braid. There are approximately 407 references to her pulling her braid in the entire series; she is mad almost all the time. Cause, women, right?

The other fun gender stereotype that Jordan draws on is the somewhat muzzy idea of "femininity."

This comes out in the way women control their half of the Source, the force that keeps the world turning and allows them to manipulate the elements. Because men can channel, too, in the Wheel of Time. Early in the series, they don't channel as much as women (we'll get to why next time) but they can access the Source. And when they access it, they fight it, like a raging fire. It almost consumes them, and they battle it for dominance every time they tap into its power.

But women . . . no, women don't get power by fighting, strength, or brute force, no sirree. That would be unfeminine. Women flow. For women, channeling involves flowing with the Source as if it's a river. It involves imagining themselves as a flower opening to the sun. Primarily, it involves surrender. Geez, who wrote this, Robin Thicke?

I can't even get into all the ick I feel about those images being connected to the idea of a woman's power. If I try, I just sound like a freshman whose mind has just been blown by their first women's studies course. Suffice it to say, the connotation of women as a delicate flower and the necessity of surrender ("In magic as in love, grasshopper") is overplayed and pretty cheesy here. 

What's the takeaway? For me, it's this. Jordan's series tries real hard to be feminist. You don't create a world in which women control most of the magic for centuries, in which half of the nations we encounter are ruled by women, and in which the central organization for both magic and politics is run entirely by women, and not have some kind of feminist message. And, in some respects, it succeeds beautifully. If I ever write fan fiction, it's gonna be White Tower fan fiction. But the strength of Jordan's message and his storytelling was undercut by his own gender biases, as will be even more clear when I talk next about masculinity and the Wheel of Time. 

*It's like the concent from Neal Stephenson's Anathem, except just with women! Aghghghgh!

*I dunno, except maybe for Min? I feel bad saying it, because I like her a LOT more than I like some of the other aggressively "sassy" lady-type characters, but she may just be a prop for Rand. Dang.

The Long War: Searching the High Meggers for a plot

**This review originally appeared here at FantasyLiterature.com, where I gave the book 1 star out of 5.**

The Long War, the second installment in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s five-book LONG EARTH series, is more tedious than the first one, probably because I have already seen the inside of their bag of tricks and I am no longer impressed.

This sequel happens about 12 years after the events of The Long Earth. Joshua, now married and with a son, has been summoned by his old friend, Lobsang (the AI reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman) to go on another journey through the Long Earth, all the way up into the High Meggers, the worlds over a million “steps” from Datum Earth.

The Long War also follows a lot of other characters, some from the first novel and some just introduced, on un- or loosely-connected journeys of their own. For instance, the US Navy Commander Maggie Kauffman, who wants to figure out how to protect the trolls, who have started suffering violence at the hands of humans. Or the Chinese expedition headed to the East to explore 20 million Earths. I kept thinking that some of these plot elements would be developed. For instance, Roberta, the sad, socially awkward teenage genius on the Chinese mission — what is her deal? The book gave me enough to be curious, to feel like she might be a linchpin of a sort, before leaving it all hanging.

I actually cared about the plotline with the trolls. They begin warning each other via the “long call,” a way that they can communicate across worlds, to avoid humans. Some humans think of them as animals, and use them as experimental subjects or harvest their bodies for organs; other want to offer them citizenship as sapient beings. Maggie ends up enlisting some into the Navy, granting them crew-status on her ship. This story arc felt realistic, like Baxter and Pratchett were exploring the diversity of potential human reactions to alien life.

But I don’t understand why two British authors would center their series, which is about the ultimate shake-up of the structure of human civilization, around the continued existence and dominance of the American government. The Long Earth, a space without meaningful boundaries, begins to erode ideas like national borders. And Baxter and Pratchett do address this complexity head-on, diving into the politics that might surround such a paradigm shift. However, in the restructured civilization they imagine, America has found a continuation in a Long Earth settlement called “Valhalla,” and the kind of government they portray is, in most of its values and practices, no different from America as we know it today. A large chunk of The Long War revolves around the political battles of Valhalla — but the politics and governmental structure of the rest of the world is scarcely mentioned.

The characters in The Long War were also less believable and less likeable than they were in The Long Earth. Lobsang changes from a quirky AI being exploring the limits of his consciousness and the universe into the omniscient, omnipresent creepmaster-general who reincarnates his friend, Sister Agnes, into a big-breasted female body without (it seems) her consent, just so he’ll have someone else to talk to. His old pal Joshua seems to have turned into a married sad sack who can’t really decide between his former traveling companion Sally (although her allure is beyond me, and apparently beyond the writers, too, who describe her as “greying,” “wiry,” and constantly tell you how many pockets her outfit has) and his wife Helen, who is jealous of Sally. Joshua’s adolescent crush on Sally was not developed enough in the first novel for it to be such a big issue in this book, but an issue it is. Still, I can’t muster up enough engagement with any of the main characters to feel sorry for Joshua’s split longings between his home life and his adventurer life.

Finally, the title is misleading, since there is no war to speak of in this book.

A better read are some of the GoodReads comments on this book, which are scathing and hilarious. My favorite one came from reader Graham Crawford, who references the series’ premise of infinite worlds where the forces of nature have created different Earths. “Unfortunately,” he writes, “we live on the ONE world where the forces of nature did NOT prevent this book from being written.”

The Long Earth: an ambitious let-down

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter is a really interesting book without being a particularly good one.

The concept for The Long Earth itself arises from a short story Pratchett wrote before he became Pratchett with a capital P. Essentially, there are other versions of Earth strung out like a strand of pearls in parallel universes--called "the Long Earth"--and the ability to travel to these Earths has begun to spread through the human race with the advent of new technology called the “stepper.” The technology itself is pointedly pointless; it is literally a potato connected, with some wires and electrical components, to a switch. Using this, people can step “East” or “West” of what comes to be known as “Datum Earth” — our Earth. The most obvious difference between the worlds of the Long Earth is that only on Datum Earth did apes evolve into homo sapiens.

This concept allows Baxter and Pratchett to explore a multitude of fascinating ideas. What would Earth look like without human impact? How about if an asteroid crashed into it a million years ago? What if the climate was cooler, or hotter? What other species would evolve given different conditions? The main characters explore these possible Earths, and more, as they travel West down the line of planets. The parallel Earths of the Long Earth also allow Pratchett and Baxter to consider what it might mean for our planet and civilization if we stumbled onto a wealth of unlimited resources.

One of the problems of The Long Earth, though, is that it is crammed with too many interesting plot points, as if it is a grab-bag of all of Pratchett and Baxter’s good ideas. The explorers encounter other sapient species out in the Long Earth — a gentle, singing ape-like species they dub “trolls,” an aggressive hog-riding species they call “elves,” and the archaeological remnants of a long-dead dinosaur species. Each of these discoveries would be enough material for a book on its own. However, in addition to these close encounters, the human explorers begin to sense an ominous presence far out in the Long Earth. Waves of sapient species are escaping from it, running down the line of planets towards Datum Earth. But there isn’t enough emphasis put on this plot point (ostensibly the big mystery and climax of the novel); instead, it feels like one among many threads. And when the protagonists do finally encounter the colossal species threatening other sapient life, the show-down is more of a let-down. Baxter and Pratchett’s alien antagonist had the potential to be very scary, almost Lovecraftian, but somehow it comes across as anticlimactic.

The story is told through multiple viewpoints. Joshua Valente, a teenager who is preternaturally good at stepping, is the nexus of most of character relationships. His friends include a cop trying to unravel the mystery of stepping, a brash lady-explorer named Sally, a nun named Sister Agnes, and an artificial intelligence who claims to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan motorbike repairman named Lobsang. However, most of these characters felt flat and unrelatable to me. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why but I still can’t really put my finger on it. The best description I have is that they felt like collections of characteristics rather than real people. Perhaps they weren’t given enough interiority; sometimes I didn’t really understand why certain characters acted the way they did. I felt genuine distaste for Sally, who is too precise a parody of sassy tough lady-hood. She is prickly and sarcastic even when it seems unwarranted and, despite giving the impression of a sharp wit, her jokes aren’t very funny.

Which could be one of the main reasons I didn’t, on the whole, like The Long Earth very much. Terry Pratchett’s trademark humor was completely absent from this book. What attempts at humor there were consisted of characters making lame jokes to each other in dialogue sequences that felt like they belonged to an action blockbuster. Granted, the point of this book wasn’t to be funny and it’s perhaps unfair of me to expect Pratchett to do the same thing every time — like expecting a comedian to be “on” when she’s just picking up her laundry. And some of the more ridiculous ideas — the potato that powers the stepper, the reincarnated Tibetan motorcycle repairman — do seem to have a Pratchett-ian stamp. It makes me wonder what the division of writing labor was like between Baxter and Pratchett, but also makes me incalculably grateful that Pratchett found a niche with the Discworld series.

Baxter and Pratchett have both signed on for a total of 5 books and, despite the lackluster writing and characterization, I will probably continue to read the series just because I find the main idea so compelling. I’ve always wished I still lived in the days before Google Earth, when you could still find untouched islands. In the Long Earth, the exploration is limitless.

*This blog originally appeared here, on FantasyLiterature.com, where I've been accepted a post as a staff reviewer! Woot!