The Space Between Worlds

hardcover, 336 pages

Published Aug. 4, 2020 by Del Rey.

ISBN:
978-0-593-13505-1
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(3 reviews)

A multiverse-hopping outsider discovers a secret that threatens her home world and her fragile place in it-a stunning sci-fi debut that's both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging. CARA IS DEAD ON THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FOUR WORLDS. The multiverse business is booming, but there's just one catch: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying-from diseases, from turf wars, from vendettas they couldn't outrun. But on this earth, Cara's survived. And she's reaping the benefits, thanks to the well-heeled Wiley City scientists who ID'd her as an outlier and plucked her from the dirt. Now she's got a new job collecting offworld data, a path to citizenship, and a near-perfect Wiley City accent. Now she can pretend she's always lived in the city she grew up staring at …

4 editions

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

The Space Between Worlds

I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.

This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same …

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

structurally and emotionally accomplished

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.