Micaiah Johnson

Cara is a traverser, a traveler from Earth 0 to the other possible Earths created by the many decisions people make in their lives. Traversers are drawn from the poor and desperate people of Ash Town, the impoverished city outside the city-state called Wiley, because their life expectancy in this and in the multiverse is low, so it’s more likely they can find Earths where they have died. This is essential because if there were a Cara alive in the world she traverses, she would die. The show more Space Between Worlds tells us her story, a story in which we soon learn that she is not who people think she is, but someone from an alternate Earth who has taken the place of the original Cara who died when she arrived in a world with a living iteration, a Cara who took her place to save her own life.

Micaiah Johnson has created a fascinating world that takes current problems in the world, climate change, inequality, racism and extends them into a future where some people are quite comfortable, though only because others suffer. Cara’s traversing career may be ending as there are only eight worlds where she still lives. She’s died in so many other worlds and knowing that is a hard fact to deal with – as though she matters so little in every world that exists.

When Cara arrives on a new-to-her Earth after she died there, she arrives to find that her death was faked. Somehow Cara’s will to live is so powerful she manages to survive the damage inflicted by this meeting of lives. Because she needed medical treatment, she interacts with this world in ways that change it and her own world forever.

Wow! I loved The Space Between Worlds so much. It will likely be on my list of best books of 2020. The prose is beautiful and often on point with brutal truths such as suggesting the Ashtown people would not have built the walls so high if they knew they would be on the wrong side of them. The sense of place is powerful, the world so plausible that it can be frightening. I am not sure we will ever figure out how to traverse the multiverse, but it seems more likely to me than intergalactic space travel. It all seems so plausible.

I love Cara and loved how she came to love herself, to just allow herself to live and not just exist. I love the possibilities at the end and how the author leaves it to the multiverse. I know which one I would choose.

The Space Between Worlds will be released on August 4th. I received an e-galley through NetGalley.

The Space Between Worlds at Del Rey | Penguin Random House
Micaiah Johnson at Vanderbilt University

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The title of Micaiah Johnson’s book is one with multiple meanings embedded in it. At its most basic, it’s a reference to the space between alternate Earths that a scientist in an unspecified future had figured out to cross. There is a catch, however: traveling to another Earth can only be done successfully if the person crossing over has no living counterpart in that world, otherwise the traveler dies a horribly painful death upon their arrival.

This complication puts an unexpected show more premium on people near the bottom of the social scale, whose life expectancy makes it likely that their analogues have already died. Among those hired to work as a “traverser” is Cara, a young woman from the badlands outside of the gleaming metropolis of Wiley City. Traversing offers Cara an unexpected opportunity to trade the poverty she knew for a life of prosperity and security. In taking it, though, she finds herself navigating between a different set of worlds that define her existence. And at the heart of all this lies a secret that Cara holds dear, one that makes her feel like an outsider regardless of whichever world she happens to occupy.

These layers of meaning speak to the quality of Johnson’s novel. From it she spins a tale of love, ambition, and power that propels the reader effortlessly throughout the book. Often her story takes surprising turns, yet none of them feel implausible or contrived as they are revealed. Much of the emotional power in it comes from the relevance of her imagined world to the one in which we live, the space between which is probably the smallest of all the ones depicted. It all makes for a great read that, like all good science fiction, uses imagined worlds to provide insight into our own. show less

I NEED EVERYONE I KNOW TO READ THIS BOOK AND TALK TO ME ABOUT IT.

I’m gonna be thinking about this book for fucking weeks. This is such a perfect amalgamation of things specifically designed to HURT ME and draw me into the story which i fucking devoured in like a day and a half. If I had had time, i would have read this in a single setting. I just… I don’t even know what to SAY yet about how I feel about this—I feel fucking everything. I adore Cara as a protagonist, she felt like a show more punch to the gut, a mirror held up at your worst and most uncomfortable moment, a tight almost painful hug, I just… I love her. I love her. I love her. I loved being inside of her head, I loved seeing her with her sister, with Dell, fighting against Nik Nik and Adra, and walking through the infinite worlds. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY ABOUT HOW MUCH I LOVED THIS BECAUSE IT HAS RENDERED ME PRETTY MUCH INCOHERENT.

So, bullet points:

-I fucking LOVE the way they bring in parallel universes to this. It is one of my favorite tropes and concepts to explore and I really love the way it was in this story.

-I shall reiterate, I LOVE CARA AS A PROTAGONIST

-I also fucking LOVE dell, and their relationship

-I also fucking ADORE Esther and the sister relationship with Cara.

-I love the exploration of class and capitalism and the environment that is peppered into this story about world hopping

-I love the prose in this. Several lines hit me like a gut punch, some of them made me groan out loud and then get yelled at by my mother, the single highest praise I can give.

I want to read everything this author ever writes and I want to read this book again about 8 million times. show less

Another clever, twisty, sci-fi suspense novel set in a dystopian near-future where travel between the universe's multiple worlds is possible. Just like the previous book in this universe (from which, in this novel, you meet many familiar faces once again) it's all too enragingly based on our own world and its horrors. Not only did I read it in one big blast, but a few pages in I put it down to flip through The Space Between Worlds to refresh my memory on some things, then ended up reading show more that book entirely over again, so ultimately tore through both books in the same 24 hours. I really recommend this book for those who want sci-fi that explicitly has something to say about the present. show less