The long earth
Terry Pratchett, other than lending his name to this book, wasn't a part of it. No humor and dark reading. Mr. Baxter should have published it under his own name, he can write, just not to my liking. gmb 3/15/20
Stats for nerds
10recommend
25mentions
24people
2012–2026years
40% recommend52% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Saying what book you're talking about is kind of a spoiler now for anyone that happens to be reading its series. Are there spoiler tags on HN? <SPOILER> The Long Utopia, book 4/5 of the Long Earth series by Pratchett and Baxter. </SPOILER> The series has very meh characters/dialogue, excellent ideas and sense of nearly possibility-unlimited discovery that's executed very well, highly recommend if that's your cup of tea. Ended up skipping all the flashback chapters near the end of the series though, that felt like a load of filler
- In the same vein as Vernor Vinge, I would recommend Stephen Baxter. Stephen's writing always gives me the same feeling as when I look at the stars at night and am reminded that where I am is just a small part of everything. The manifold trilogy as well as the long earth series he did with Terry Pratchett are very good. The first is not anthropocentric, which I found was a refreshing change.
- The Long Earth series is fantastic. I'm not a huge fan of Baxter's work but these books are among my fave scifi reads.
- I have not seen anyone mention the long earth series, a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. It is based on a very interesting concept. Very different in its style to the discworld books, but shows off how good a writer Pratchett was even when straying from his usual fare.
- I really enjoyed the first few books of The Long Earth[0] series in which characters heavily utilize air ships similar to zeppelins.
- Bob Shaw wrote a duology "The Ragged Astronauts" & "The Wooden Spaceships" in which the ratio of a circles circumference to it's diameter is 3. As far as I can tell, the only reason this factoid is included is to defuse any arguments about the plausibility of other elements of the setting (a binary planet with a shared atmosphere such that it is possible for a feudal society to stage an invasion from one to the other using balloons).
Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle has Ptolemaic cosmology and Aristotelian physics.
The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World by A.K. Dewdney is sort of a modern take on the classic Flatland by Edwin Abbot, and manages to improve upon it considerably.
The Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter posits an infinite set of parallel Earths that can be reached with a trivial but unorthodox electronic device. You have to travel to them incrementally, one sideways step
