Review: The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson

[Russ Allbery]

The Space Between Worlds
by Micaiah Johnson

Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 2020
ISBN:      0-593-13506-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     327

Cara is valuable because, in most places, she's dead.

In the world of Earth Zero, as the employees of the Eldridge Institute
call it, a scientific genius named Adam Bosch developed the ability to
travel between parallel worlds. This ability is not limitless, however.
One restriction is that the parallel world has to be very close; large
divergences of history render them unreachable. The other restriction
is that anyone who attempts to travel to a world in which the local
version of themselves is still alive is rejected: physically mangled in
ways that result in a very short remaining lifespan.

Earth Zero has not found a way to send information between worlds
without sending people there physically to collect it. Those people are
traversers, and their value lies in how many of their parallel selves
have died. Each death in one of the 380 worlds Earth Zero can reach
means another world that person can traverse to. They are the
transportation system for a network of information-gathering nodes,
whose collected contents are mined for stock tips, political cautions,
and other information of value. Cara is dead on 372 worlds, and thus
provides valuable savings on employee salaries.

These related worlds are not so much post-apocalyptic as a continuation
of current wealth disparity trends, although it's also clear that the
climate has gotten worse. The Eldridge Institute, which controls
traversing, is based in Wiley City, a walled, climate-controlled
arcology of skyscrapers with a dome that filters out the dangerous sun.
Its citizens are rich, with the best social support that money can buy.
They are not interested in immigrants, unless they are extremely
valuable.

Cara is not from Wiley City. She is from Ashtown, the encampment in the
desert outside of Wiley City's walls. That's part of the explanation
for her death rate; in Ashtown, there are only a few ways to survive,
particularly if one is not from the stiflingly religious Rurals, and
most of them are dependent on being in the good graces of the local
warlord and his Mad-Max-style enforcers. Being a traverser gets Cara
out of Ashtown and into Wiley City, but not as a citizen, although
that's dangled vaguely as a possible future prize. She's simply an
employee, on a work permit, who enjoys the comforts of Wiley City for
exactly as long as she's useful. Meanwhile, she juggles the demands of
her job, her attraction to her watcher Dell, and her family in Ashtown.
She is profoundly, aggressively cynical.

Cara is also not precisely who people think she is.

The Space Between Worlds pulls off a beautifully elegant combination of
two science fiction subgenres: parallel universes and time travel. Both
have been part of science fiction for decades, but normally parallel
universes are substantially different from each other. Major historical
events go differently, Nazis win World War II, Spock has a goatee, etc.
Minor deviations are more often the subject of time travel stories, as
travelers attempt to tweak the past and influence the future. Johnson
instead provides the minor variations and small divergences of time
travel stories in a parallel world framework, with no actual time
travel involved or possible. The resulting story shows the same ripple
effect of small differences, but the future remains unwritten and
unconstrained, which avoids the stiflingly closed feeling of most time
travel plots.

Against that backdrop is set a story of corporate and personal
intrigue, but one with a far deeper understanding of class and place
than almost all of science fiction. Cara is not from Ashtown in the
normal sense of science fiction novels written by comfortably
middle-class white authors about protagonists from the wrong side of
the tracks, who show their merit and then never look back. Cara is from
Ashtown in a way that means she misses the taste of its dirt and
understands its people and feels seen there. Wiley City knows very well
that she's from Ashtown, and doesn't let her forget it.

This type of ambiguous relationship with place and wealth, and deep
connection to where one comes from, is so rare in science fiction, and
it's beautifully written here. Cara wants to be in Wiley City over the
alternative; the potential loss of her job is a real threat. But at the
same time she is not at home there, because she is not visible there.
Everything is slightly off, she has no one she can really talk to, and
her reactions don't quite fit. No one understands her the way that her
family in Ashtown does. And yet, by living in Wiley City, she is
becoming less at home in Ashtown as well. She is becoming an outsider.

It takes about 70 pages for the story in The Space Between Worlds to
really get started. Those first 70 pages is very important background
information that the rest of the story builds on, but they weren't that
engrossing. Once the story kicks into gear, though, it's a tense,
complicated story that I had a hard time predicting and an even harder
time putting down. It's not perfect (more on that in a moment), but
Johnson weaves together Cara's sense of place, her family connections,
her sense of self, and her internal moral compass to create a memorable
protagonist in a page-turning plot with a satisfying payoff. She uses
our ability to look in on several versions of each character to give
them additional satisfying heft and depth. Esther, Cara's highly
religious sister, is the most delightful character in this book, and
that's saying a lot coming from someone who usually doesn't like highly
religious characters.

I do have some world-building quibbles, and came up with more when I
mulled over the book after finishing it, so you may need to strengthen
your suspension of disbelief. The passive information gathering via
traversing made a lot of sense; the bulk import of raw materials via
the industrial hatch makes less sense given the constraints of the
world. (Who is loading those materials into the other side? Or are they
somehow traversing them directly out of the ground? Wouldn't someone
notice?) The plot also partly hinges on a bit of lost technology that
is extremely difficult to square with the rest of the setting, and felt
like a transparent justification for introducing Mad Max elements into
the setting.

The quibble I noticed the most may be unavoidable given the setting:
alternate worlds with slightly different versions of the same
characters creates a potential explosion in cast size, which Johnson
deals with by focusing on the cross-world variations of a small number
of characters. I like all of those characters, but it does give the
story a bit of an incestuous feel. The politics of every world revolve
around the same ten people, and no one else seems to matter (or usually
even has a name). That said, a small cast is a better problem to have
than a confusing cast. Johnson does a great job helping the reader keep
all the characters and relationships straight across their alternate
world variations. I didn't realize until after I finished the book how
difficult that probably was, which is the sign of a job well done.

I do also have to complain about how completely dense Cara is when it
comes to Dell, but I won't say any more than that to avoid spoilers.
There are some things I figured out way before Cara did, though, and
that made her behavior rather frustrating.

This is an extremely impressive first novel that does some lovely
things with genre and even more impressive things with social class and
mobility. It's a little rough in places, you have to bear with the
first 70 pages, and the ending, while a fitting conclusion to the
emotional arc, seemed wildly unbelievable to me given the events of the
plot. But it's very much worth reading despite those flaws. Johnson
respects her characters and their culture and their world, and it
shows.

This was one of the best science fiction novels I read in 2021.

(Content warning for physical and emotional partner abuse.)

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-12-30

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-593-13506-7.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>