This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025.
Every novel you read should, in some way or another, take you to a place far away from your own.
Good or bad, this world should provide an escape from the everyday sameness of the life you lead, and open up new places and possibilities in which you can disappear.
But some authors are better at this diversionary world-building than others, with one of the best exponents of the art being M. R. Carey, who, beginning with The Girl With All the Gifts, has shown a breathtaking ability to form a world, give it veracity, colour, culture and life and the sort of humanity you need if we as readers are to buy into the existence of this place so markedly, and welcomingly, different from our own.
In his latest novel, Echo of Worlds, the second instalment in his two-part The Pandeminion series (see review of book 1, Infinity Gate), he takes things up a notch, introducing us to a diverse array of people and locations, all of them part of the much-written about multiverse, where multiple versions of the same planet, in this case Earth, exist next to each other in an almost unending (but not quite; the idea of infinite quantum possibilities is quickly put to bed) chain.
Each of these planets exist in the same astronomical and chronological time and place but come with difference great and small, withy an array of sentient pieces, many derived from animals like apes, rabbits and dogs to name just three, and some even from plants.
She had gone out of her way to engineer this reunion, but now it had finally happened, she wasn’t sure whether she was offering Essien a shot at redemption or just using him the way he had tried to use her. The ambiguity made her unhappy, but she would have to live with it.
If live was the right word for what she was currently doing.
It’s a compellingly exciting daisy chain of of worlds upon worlds, of evolutionary choices built upon evolutionary choices, and while many tens of thousands, likely hundreds of thousands, remained as they have always been, a good many, some 350,000-plus in fact have been brought together in a burgeoning empire known as the Pandeminion in which reside countless trillions of selves as they are called.
Life is sweet for this linking of worlds with all the wealth and power, and Achilles Heel-wise, arrogance of an empire a billion times greater than but not that dissimilar to, the Roman Empire, until, in book one of the series, the Pandeminion encounters the Ansurrection, a totally machine populated and administered empire which has similar imperial extent and ambitions as its newest discoverer.
In true imperialistic form, neither side quite gets the other and ends up seeing this new gathering of worlds, not as a welcome new opportunity to diversity and grow, but as a virulent threat to be opposed, attacked and wiped of the face of many, many, MANY earths.
So goes the sorry state of life, organic or machine, and so you suspect it will always go until some form of mutually assured destruction takes place and the sad, pointless cycle begins all over again (there is evidence this pattern has been repeated over and over throughout the entire existence of the multiverse with multiple dead worlds speaking the absolute deathless certainty of power opposing power and neither emerging a winner).
(courtesy Hachette Australia)
But in Echo of Worlds, five quite disparate characters we met in the first instalment – a human-centric AI known as Rupshe, the digitally captured mind of once-human physicist Hadiz Tambuwal, Pandominion soldiers, Essien and Moon (different in ethnicity and approach to being military pawns of a sprawlingly regime), a sweetly caring rabbit-child named Paz and her robotic BFF and ex-Ansurrectiion spy, Dulcimer Coronal – are seeking to arrest this terrible cycle.
The hope is that the Mother Mass, a sentient planet with the ability to share time and tide and to save both the Pandeminion and the Ansurrection from oblivion, will intervene and stop, for the first time, a dynamic as old as the multiverse itself.
But the five are up against it with the forces of the same-old same-old proving to be almost immune to any kind of salvationary intervention.
It’s in the “almost” that Echo of Worlds vibrantly and fantastically exists, the hope that fate can be averted and old cycles can be reformed powering these characters and a ceaselessly pedal-to-the-metal narrative forward with breathtaking blockbuster speed.
The brilliance of Echo of Worlds, and the Pandominion series as a whole, is that for all of its adrenaline-fuelled action, the novel is full to the brim with thoughtful rumination on what it means to be sentient, to have choice and to have the power to avert your broken path should you chose to use it.
Moon spat out of the open side of the airframe. ‘We’re not relying on luck, we’re relying on you.’
‘I’m aware, And I will do my best.’
‘Yeah, you go ahead and do that. Okay, let’s lift. And keep the side door open. I want to see the fireworks before I jump into the godsdamned frying pan.’
It is, in other words, a thinking person’s adventure, one where lives are on the line, in some fairly epic and spectacular ways, but then so are entire civilisations, vivaciously-realised ideas and the very idea of humanity itself.
But can five plucky selves save the architects of doom – they see it as salvation but we know differently thanks to Carey’s expansively informed writing, we know differently – from themselves?
Can a near certainty of oblivion be turned around and life win over the ever-shadowing spectre of death?
The idealists in us and Hadiz and the others (well, maybe not Moon, though she does slowly come around) would like to think so, but through most of Echo of Worlds‘ gripping run, you are left running if even brilliant, well-intentioned and eminently capable people can avert what looks to be an all but foregone conclusion.
With world-building of the highest, imagination stoking and soul-stirring order, characters who are realised so fully and deeply that care about every little thing that happens to them, and storyline does not let up even as it allows for many moments of truly arresting emotional intimacy, Echo of Worlds is an extraordinary ending to a thrillingly compelling two-part series that affirms that while there may be nothing new under the sun, there might worlds upon worlds of possibilities under many of them.