Terry Pratchett Long Earth Series Epub Download Free

The Long World: Terry Pratchett's Other Great Series

Co-authored past Stephen Baxter

Terry Patchett'southward passing in 2015 was a blow that many of us are still recovering from. He is most well remembered for his Disc World serial, which encompassed dozens of novels with any number of subseries within. It was a shared universe that was funny, compelling, and wise all at the same time, and the stories — fifty-fifty apart from all that stuff — were rip roaring fun.

Information technology wasn't until after he passed that I noticed this other series Pratchett had worked on — co authored with the also slap-up Stephen Baxter — called The Long Earth. It's a quieter series than Disc World. Information technology has a dissimilar tone and different vocalism, and it is eminently satisfying in a very dissimilar way. Rather than the open up sprawl of Disc World, the Long Earth is more conceptually contained, which is ironic because the first book begins when humans are given sudden access to an space number of alternate Earths "side by side" with each other.

"Don't worry! On another Earth it already happened."

Here's the setup: A non quite mad scientist (maybe, grumpy?) publishes plans on the internet for a device that allows ane to move into an Globe parallel to our own. Kids around the world pick upwards on this and on "Step Day" thousands build this device — which tin be made with items from a Radio Shack and a white potato equally a power source — and accept their first "step." Since they actually didn't know what was going to happen they freak the heck out. Ane kid, Joshua Valienté, knew exactly what was going to happen and rescues dozens of kids who stepped out of their Madison, Wisconsin, environs onto an World which had never seen humans. Joshua, it turns out, is a "natural stepper," and because he rescues those kids he'southward a hero. He becomes "our hero" for the next five books.

"Commonly, when there was nada to practice he listened to the silence."

The first salient fact most the Long World is that there are a lot of earths, an infinite concatenation of them that diverge from each other as important events may or may not have happened. For example, did the asteroid hitting the World and wipe out the dinosaurs? Did information technology miss the Earth completely, leaving the dinosaurs in their apex spot? Or did it slam into the planet in such a mode that the World was completely destroyed, leaving a "gap" in the concatenation of Earths? Answer: all of the to a higher place.

The 2d salient fact is that there'south simply one Earth that led to humans — ours. The Earths of the long Globe are free of humans, pollution, development, noise, corruption, etc. They are too free from scarcity. If yous can just pace into another World and choice the fruit hanging from its trees, and and then another Earth, and another … how does that change the mode humans interact with one another and choose to be together?

"You clever apes, smart enough to destroy everything around you, never smart enough to understand what information technology is you are losing in the procedure."

The offset book of the series, The Long World, sets the stage, throws some irons in the burn, and plants seeds that sprout throughout the 5 books. Joshua is invited to explore the Long Earth with Lobsang, an android/AI who is the reincarnated (resurrected?) form of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman (and who speaks in the voice of Zachary Quinto — in my caput, at to the lowest degree). We're also introduced to Emerge Lindsay, daughter of the aforementioned grumpy scientist, who is also a natural stepper, from a family unit of natural steppers who have been naturally stepping for centuries.

The joy of the serial is in the characters — interesting, maddening, fascinating, and mannerly — in the stories of each private book, and in the slow unfolding of the whole series. The second book, The Long War, shows us the implications of an Earth — ours — that wants to hold onto things, people and control, and those people do not want to be held. As they practice often in their piece of work, Pratchett and Baxter resolve the plot in a way that plays with the traditional beats of that story, while accenting them in a way that is unfamiliar and refreshing. Things don't turn out the way you expect. The usual suspects do unusual things.

The Long Mars builds on the discoveries of the first two books and uses the Gap Earth to observe a Mars that supports life. Mars, it turns out, is too "long," though the Long Earth and Long Mars don't run parallel to each other. (The geometry of this Long Dimension is pretty fascinating). The Long Cosmos and The Long Utopia build out similarly. The scope of the serial, it turns out, is the life of Joshua Valienté — the moral middle of the book and a very intimate lens through which nosotros access this infinite (literally) expansive fictional multiverse.

And, merely to remind, information technology'due south great storytelling, past great storytellers. Funny and gripping tales. These kept me up past bedtime more than once.