(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Talk of the multiverse is everywhere these days.
It’s partly based on reports of new and emerging science but it’s driven, you have to suspect, by the fact that our own world is diving headfirst, driven by inaction over climate change and extreme political machinations, into the kind of oblivion we once thought was purely the realm of apocalyptic and dystopian literature.
But here we are in the third decade of the twenty-first century and as wildfires and droughts, floods and hurricanes grow ever more fierce and destructive, we find ourselves wondering what an alternate Earth or Earths really might look like.
Well, wonder no more because imaginatively talented author M. R. Carey (The Girl With All the Gifts, The Book of Koli) has dreamt up in Infinity Gate, the first instalment in a two-part series, how a legion of varied Earths ight manifest themselves and how similar and yet fantastically different they might be to our own.
As a reader, this is purely an exploration of tantalising what-ifs, some thrillingly exciting, other fear-inducing, but for one of the lead characters in this thoughtfully humanistic thriller, scientist Hadiz Tambuwal, it’s far from academic and might well be the stuff of life and death.
She is part of a billionaires-funded last-ditch scientifically-driven attempt based at a university in Lagos, Nigeria to avert climatic catastrophe and pull the Earth back from the brink.
Alas, she and her fellow scientists are all a little bit too late until, with civilisation-ending environment collapse well underway, she discovers on a way to slip through to another dimension and then another and another and so on.
She climbed to her feet at last, and shucked off the hazmat suit. There were so many people she needed to tell. So much to explain. So many arrangements to make.
‘Would you like to record a log entry?’ Rupshe coxed.
‘Later.’ Hadiz left the lab and set off at a fast walk towards the admin block.
She was halfway there when the first explosions began.
Her experiments, undertaken with the aid of a compassionate, information-hungry AI known as Rupshe, lead her to humanity’s greatest ever discovery; the Panominion, which is far and away the best empiric name this reviewer has come across in some time, a political and trading alliance that encompasses a seemingly endless multiplicity of worlds and which has turned considerable evolutionary difference to its prosperous advantage.
Uniting Earths so different that only a fraction of worlds have ape-like descendants with many others featuring races evolved from rabbits, wolves, and insects, and yet so alike that the same sorts of cities, even if they go by different names, crop up in roughly the same places across the globe.
Held together by what amounts to a military authoritarianism but underpinned by a mutuality of need and supply, the Pandominion represents a chance for Hadiz’s Earth, our Earth, to fight to live another day by colonising similar type alternates that spread across the multiverse in infinite number, full of resources and land and the alluring possibility of being able to start all over again.
No wonder we find the idea of the multiverse so utterly compelling – it could mean, and this is certainly what Hadiz thinks, the difference between us living and prospering, or dying and disappearing into the history books, assuming there’s anyone left to read them.
(courtesy Hachette Australia)
But while imaginative multi-world building that underpins Infinity Gate is a superlative exercise in imaginatively expansive thinking, the Pandominion, and indeed the rest of the multiverse is not a paradise here on multiple Earths.
In fact, the Pandominion through means reckless and reeking of comfortable hubris, ends up in a war with a machine intelligence that, like its enemy, has acquired thousands of worlds to call its own.
Theirs is a battle for the heart and soul of the multiverse, driven by an inability to appreciate, even a little bit what a lifeform utterly alien to your own might actually be like; the war occurs largely because each side assumes the other inferior to their own and responds and attacks accordingly, without pondering whether they are more alike than they care to admit.
It’s this huge lack of empathy and a gaping philosophical divide (though, again, they are far closer than either cares to investigate) that drives this war and captures a number of other key characters in its planet-scorching grip and which means that while Infinity Gate is full-on action and thrilling adventure, it also has a questioning heart of empathic social commentary.
Both sprawlingly, excitingly immense, and emotionally and socially intimate, Infinity Gate reflects Carey’s gifted ability to go enormously big with unique ideas that challenge anything that’s gone before it, and yet dive deep into what it means to be human, whatever form that might take (and don’t count out the machines here; they are more lifelike than anyone cares to imagine) and to ask what it means to be truly alive.
He felt inside himself the stillness that nests within extreme velocities. He was hurtling at breakneck speed towards a sheer wall. He would either break through to something better or else the impact would destroy him. In the interim, and for the first time since as far back as he could remember, he was at peace.
It’s that duality of huge ideas and intimacy of humanity that, along with multi-world building so enthrallingly clever and inventive you will captivated every time Carey takes you to another complex and fascinating twist on the Earth we know, that makes Infinity Gate so incredibly readable.
You essentially come for the out-there premise, which delivers handsomely at every evolutionary turn, and you stay for the compelling stories of people, and yes, machines, who may outwardly look wholly different but who carry the same cares and concerns that we do.
It’s that grasp on the very relatable essence of what it means to be human, and an ability to affectingly express it, that turns Infinity Gate, like it did the zombie apocalypse and future dystopian worlds he has previously taken to, worlds that by any reasonable measure we should not be able to relate to, into fantastical realism that really hit home.
Yes, the ideas are audacious and the execution breathtakingly beyond anything we know, but you are able to see yourself in these places and relate intimately and emotionally to them, not simply because of the skillfully-wrought characters but because Carey knows that the outward casing may differ, the inward humanity doesn’t fundamentally differ all that much.
Infinity Gate then is a dazzling trip across worlds without number and possibilities beyond counting but one that feel relatable and real because it knows that at the very heart of things we all want to feel safe and stay alive and be loved and connected and that if we keep that in mind, trips through even the most wild different of places may not feel so alien after all, and perhaps, just perhaps, catastrophe might be averted and good, sustaining things might come our way.