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Loading... The Long Earthby Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter
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Really fascinating read and extremely well written. ( ) Story: 5 / 10 Characters: 7 Setting: 8 Prose: 6 Did not look forward to this book. Thought it would be too similar to time travel books, which don't really work at all. However, it turns out that space distinctions are quite different. While The Long Earth could certainly have introduced the concept in a different way, the setting does work quite well. This is also the first book by two authors I've had to read. They also pulled that off quite well. The story is a bit direction-less at times, but it is really the result of the adventure plot. This also turns out to be the largest failing of the book. Definitely not continuing the series, but not warning people away from reading either. It was enjoyable but I will admit it was slow to develop. I was left feeling like the first book was one long setup for the series. Thus isn't a terrible thing but it did leave me wishing the story was a little stronger. Reads a lot like a Jules Verne adventure novel ( Around the World in 80 Days for instance). Nothing that would stop me from reading the next one.
The Long Earth is a short read: the pages riffle past and there's much to enjoy. The dialogue is a bit Hollywood 101, and much of it is characters explaining things to other characters, sometimes at great length ("Why are you telling me all this?" Joshua asks at one point, with apparent ingenuousness). But it's a charming, absorbing and somehow spacious piece of imagineering for all that. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
1916: The Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong and the wind in the leaves. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of no-man's-land gone? For that matter, where has Percy gone? 2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Police officer Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive--some say mad, others allege dangerous--scientist who seems to have vanished. Sifting through the wreckage, Jansson find a curious gadget: a box containing some rudimentary wiring, a three-way switch, and a potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way humankind views the world forever. The "stepper" enables a person using it to step sideways into another America, another wherever that person happened to be, another Earth. And if the person using it keeps on stepping, they keep on entering even more Earths. This is the Long Earth. And the further away a stepper travels, the stranger -- and sometimes more dangerous -- the Earths become. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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