The Space Between Worlds

, #1

Paperback, 336 pages

English language

Published Aug. 5, 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton.

ISBN:
978-1-5293-8710-0
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4 stars (8 reviews)

Eccentric genius Adam Bosch has cracked the multiverse and discovered a way to travel to parallel Earths. There's just one problem: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive.

Enter Cara. Of the 380 realities that have been unlocked, Cara is dead in all but 8.

Born in the wastelands outside the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City, Cara has fought her entire life just to survive. So when she's offered a job travelling the multiverse, and a safe place in the city to call home, she's willing to do anything to keep it that way.

But then one of her doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, and Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined - and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just …

3 editions

reviewed The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #1)

Goodreads Review of The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

5 stars

I am so mad at myself for putting this book off for as long as I did. I actually checked it out from the library TWICE and didn't get around to reading it either time. I picked it up during this slow work week to read at work since no one else is working, and I was absolutely gripped. Despite some questionable structural decisions I enjoyed this the whole way through.

We are following Cara, a woman living in the fictional, ultra prosperous Wiley City, one of the many walled fortresses surrounded by desolate wastelands which are populated only by the impoverished slums existing outside the city. Cara is originally from Ashtown, one of these slums, but due to extremely lucky circumstances, finds herself as a temporary resident of Wiley city working for the Eldridge Institute, a massively influential mega corporation founded by Adam Bosch which has discovered the secrets …

reviewed The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #1)

structurally and emotionally accomplished

5 stars

I had wanted something to read where I did not feel obligated or compelled to take notes, but then there were so many phrases buttressing the plot worth noting down, that I quickly ran out of bookmarks — even despite abandoning a majority of Johnson’s sharpest constructions to the depths of pages read. So, by a third in, I guessed that regardless of how I was to find this novel in any other respects, The space between worlds was at least a four star piece for revisitability. The word-to-word texture remained more prosaic than I fully take to in fiction, but there is much to appreciate in what Johnson has built, and how.

reviewed The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #1)

Review of 'The Space Between Worlds' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

An interesting story that could have been extraordinary if the world-building had more depth.

I initially discovered this book when I saw some fanart of Cara and Dell, and on that front the book did not disappoint. The main character whose first perspective we experience is Cara, who works as a traverser. A scientist called Adam Bosch discovered the existence of the multiverse and found a way to travel to parallel worlds that are all different from Earth Zero. But to travel to another version of our planet, the person must be dead in the alternate universe already, or you die when traversing to it. Cara is special, because of the known alternate Earths, she is dead on all but 8, which means she has more access than any other traverser.

On a trip to Earth 175, she discovers a sinister truth though, that changes everything about how Cara views …

Watch this space. Not just between worlds.

3 stars

This is a novel of alternates worlds set on post-apocalypse Earth. On Earth Zero, as he calls it, an inventor-entrepreneur safely ensconced in a gated city shielded from the harsh conditions of its planet has found a way to reach alternate versions of the planet. Crossing over is risky, so the task devolves to the expendable: the citizens of the wasteland ruled by warlords outside the city gates. Like Cara.

I’m not sure anyone could care enough for Cara, or her tech megalomaniac boss with a dark past, to carry a novel, were it not for a simple fact: This is not a novel of alternates worlds set on post-apocalypse Earth.

What Micaiah Johnson has created instead is something that takes the form and background of its genres and uses them for a meditation on inequality, violence – carried out on others and self-inflicted –, and all forms of exploitation, …

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rated it

5 stars