From the international bestselling M. R. Carey comes a thrilling tale set in the multiverse - the tale of humanity's expansion across millions of dimensions, and the AI technology that might see it all come to an end . . .
INFINITY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.
The Pandominion: a political and trading alliance of a million worlds - except that they're really just the one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an AI threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they'll eradicate it by whatever means necessary, no matter the cost to human life.
Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth's environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel. It could save everyone on her dying planet, but now she's walked into the middle of a war on a scale she never dreamed of.
And she needs to choose a side before it kills her.
I'm delighted to be hosting the blog tour for Infinity Gate today. Many thanks to M.R. Carey, Orbit Books and Tracy Fenton from Compulsive Readers for inviting me and for my advance copy of the novel.
Having loved M.R. Carey's Ramparts Trilogy (The Book of Koli, The Trials of Koli, The Fall of Koli), I knew to expect something vividly imaginative but Infinity Gate, the first book in his new Pandominion duology is even more ambitious. It has the scope of a space opera but is set on Earth – or rather many versions of Earth. From Marvel to Everything Everywhere All At Once, the idea of the multiverse is a recurring concept in science fiction and this is a welcome, hugely impressive addition to the subgenre.
M.R. Carey's bold interpretation features a fractal multiverse where each of the Earths has different names and has developed separately Many of these diverse worlds have come together in a vast political and trading alliance; resources are pooled and shared, with inhabitants able to move between worlds thanks to Step plates which allow for inter-dimensional travel, but unsurprisingly this ostensibly utopian state is anything but...
The unnamed narrator at the start immediately sets the tone by describing themselves as a child born in wartime, 'in one of the biggest conflicts this universe has ever seen' and in beginning their story of how they came to be introduces three individuals who become the most significant characters in the book; scientist, Hadiz Tambuwal, Essien Nkanika, 'a rogue', and Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, a rabbit, described as the least remarkable of all at the outset.
This leads us directly to Hadiz and while it's not expressly named as such, it's clear that she lives on our Earth, sometime in the future. It's still recognisable but is rapidly reaching its end point, with the inevitable consequences of war, pollution and climate change meaning human habitation is no longer viable. Hadiz works alone and seems to like it that way, although there is a sense of poignancy to her brittleness, and her loneliness is unmistakeable. Increasingly isolated as her scientific colleagues are forced to abandon their research programmes, she lives on campus in Lagos and it's here she accidentally stumbles on travel between dimensions. As she begins to understand and investigate further, these chapters are quite physics heavy but while the concepts are advanced, the language never feels too dense and I enjoyed the discussions around subjects such as AI, dark energy, vectors and scalars, and fractal patterns. These early chapters are the world-building necessary for readers to be able to understand and visualise what takes place, and I was fascinated from the start.
When we meet Essien, his circumstances are evidently incomparable to those of Hadiz but despite being born into a poor country and being driven to make choices which frequently made his life worse rather than better, his Lagos isn't so dissimilar and perhaps even more familiar to readers. It's a place of enormous societal imbalance, where people are desperate for work and forced into labour; the graphic descriptions here are almost an assault on the senses and undoubtedly reflect the sort of conditions people endure in real-life. Essien might be a rogue then but he's not unlikeable and indeed, his decisions, as unwise or selfish as they may be, are always understandable.
Topaz is arguably both the most and least recognisable figure of the three; as an inhabitant of Ut, a world where burrowing animals, notably lagomorphs became the dominant species, she looks very different but by the point in the novel where she appears, readers are already au fait with characters who resemble the various creatures of our world so a rabbit girl doesn't seem excessively strange. It also quickly becomes evident that Paz experiences the same sort of fears and concerns as teenagers everywhere. She doesn't quite fit in with her peers and longs for the time when she can leave Ut and join the Cielo, the armed forces of the Pandominion. Like Hadiz and Essien, Paz is a rather solitary figure and in a novel about interconnectedness, it's striking to realise that all three are lonely and driven to seek relationships of a sort with others.
Throughout the book there are a number of tense or brutal scenes and M.R. Carey never flinches from describing the most horrific atrocities but at its heart, Infinity Gate is really an exploration of self. As the Pandominion wages a terrible, costly war on an AI hegemony they believe threatens everything, the characters and readers are forced to confront their viewpoints and prejudices. Sentience and selfhood is debated throughout and there are key scenes which change everything that previously seemed obvious.
With its nuanced, superbly developed characterisation and the expansive development of worlds and ideas, Infinity Gate is intelligent, thought-provoking science-fiction at its most compelling and immersive. The omniscient narrator whose voice appears at various points is both a guide and a mystery, and it's their final words which ensures the novel concludes on an intriguing cliffhanger. I was engrossed from start to finish by this brilliant book and can't wait for the next instalment. Very highly recommended.
Infinity Gate is published by Orbit Book, purchasing links can be found here.
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