Books of 2012: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
Mar
22
2012

Instead of writing one huge post of all the books I’m looking forward to in 2012 with info on them, I had decided to highlight some of these books in their own posts throughout the rest of 2011. I’ve decided to carry this feature forward into this year as I discover new books coming out this year that sound interesting and continue with books of 2013 as it gets closer to the end of the year.

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

The Long Earth is a book I’m rather curious about because of the authors involved – Terry Pratchett, the prolific author of the hilarious Discworld series and many more books, and Stephen Baxter, award-winning science fiction author. While I’ve read many of Terry Pratchett’s books, I have yet to read Stephen Baxter, although I’ve wanted to read one of his books for a while now. (My husband tells me I should read Anti-Ice.)

The Long Earth will be released in hardcover and ebook in the US on June 19th, and it will be available in the UK on June 21st.

I was all excited because I thought I found an excerpt, but it turned out to be a blank page that will most likely have an excerpt later. However, three characters from The Long Earth were recently described on Terry Pratchett’s Facebook page (along with the cover for Dodger, another book by Terry Pratchett that is coming out this fall).

About The Long Earth:

2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Junior cop Sally Jansson is called out to the house of Willis Lynsey, a reclusive scientist, for an animal-cruelty complaint: the man was seen forcing a horse in through the door of his home. Inside there is no horse. But Sally finds a kind of home-made utility belt. She straps this on — and ‘steps’ sideways into an America covered with virgin forest. Willis came here with equipment and animals, meaning to explore and colonise. And when Sally gets back, she finds Willis has put the secret of the belt on the internet. The great migration has begun…

The Long Earth: our Earth is but one of a chain of parallel worlds, lying side by side in a higher space of possibilities, each differing from its neighbours by a little (or a lot): an infinite landscape of infinite possibilities. And the further away you travel, the stranger the worlds get. The sun and moon always shine, the basic laws of physics are the same. However, the chance events which have shaped our particular version of Earth, such as the dinosaur-killer asteroid impact, might not have happened and things may well have turned out rather differently. But only our Earth hosts mankind.

Other Books of 2012:

 
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Review of Songs of the Earth by Elspeth Cooper »