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5. Infinity: A Bridger's Story -Worldbuilding
What did you think of the world building? Did the world implied in the beginning make sense as a near future? Did bridging - the concept and the presentation in the story - work as intended? Would you have done anything different?
Comments
> Make sense? Nope, not really LOL. It probably would have made more sense if it was a team to scientists and engineers evolving their new tech by sending rich MMA clients on death defying adventures!
Haha yes MMA test subjects of the cunning scientists love it! BTW I had never come across MMA before so either I've lived a very sheltered life or it's just never made it across the Atlantic - I worked out from context it was kind of like wrestling (which over here is mostly staged performance rather than the actual fighting one sees in boxing) crossed with Rollerball. But I don't really have a frame of reference for understanding that part of Infinity's life
Small teams going out through a techno device inevitably draws links to Stargate though IMHO Stargate did it a lot better. Of course that was space travel in the ordinary sense rather than across parallel worlds, but there's the same sense of not knowing what you were going to find at the other end.
The other comparison I made was with The Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (an improbable combination but it worked 🙂). That used the same idea of almost-parallel worlds separated by probabilistic events and differing in minor or major ways from our Earth (The Datum), depending how far back in time the split happened. In that series there's much more of an over-arching plot, and a lot of exploration of how humans could enjoy or abuse the opportunity (plus some calamities on Datum Earth which drove the exploration at a faster pace). In that world, iron would not go across but almost all non ferrous things would, so there was an interesting resurgence of working with wood and other such natural materials.
Bridging clearly worked as it did in order make the conceit of the books work. It doesn't make any sort of coherent sense beyond that, and it doesn't need to. It makes no more sense than "light of a yellow sun / kyptonite", or "bitten by a radioactive spider" or any such guff.
Then the question is, does the worldbuilding set up interesting stories? It could, but those will be the content of the later books in the series. We didn't see a lot of "things happening in other worlds" in this book.
> Then the question is, does the worldbuilding set up interesting stories? It could, but those will be the content of the later books in the series. We didn't see a lot of "things happening in other worlds" in this book.
This is where The Long Earth really scored in my view - the early chapters brought in most of the key factors which would be unfolded later on. The authors there had the advantage of writing the temporally earliest book chronologically first, rather than filling in the intro at a later date.
Keith Laumer's Imperium series is what I think of as the classic parallel worlds universe. In that series, travel between timelines was discovered on an alternate earth where the American revolution never happened, and Britain ruled the earth. They expanded over the neighboring, similar timelines, forming a group of politically unified worlds called the Imperium. Our earth was located alone in an area known as the 'Blight', where all other timeline civilizations had failed, and destroyed themselves. The first book was Worlds of the Imperium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_of_the_Imperium
Travel between timelines was by vehicles which only moved between timelines, not within them. You could take anything with you so long as it fit in the vehicle, and they had different sizes. This seems more like the Long Earth series Richard mentioned.
Laumer was mostly known for three series. Bolo- an immensely popular series about giant robot tanks which never appealed to me, but which is still going on with other writers; Retief another very popular funny, satirical series about an interstellar diplomat, which ring true because Laumer was a diplomat; and to a much lesser degree, the Worlds of the Imperium. Laumer was in the Army Air Force in WWII, and served two separate terms in the US Air Force, retiring as a captain. In between those terms he was with the diplomatic service.
Per Wikipedia - which I agree with - "His novels and stories tend to follow one of three patterns:
I really liked the Imperium and Retief series. He was, I think, a step below Grand Master, but wrote a lot of very good, well written SF. As for Bolo, I never read any of them, but I read all the Imperium works and many Retiefs, enjoying them all.
> Per Wikipedia - which I agree with - "His novels and stories tend to follow one of three patterns:
>
> Fast-paced, straight adventures in time and space, with an emphasis on lone-wolf, latent superhuman protagonists, self-sacrifice, and transcendence
> Broad, sometimes over-the-top, comedies
> Experimental work verging on New Wave science fiction"
The first of these makes him sound like A E van Vogt
A fair estimate, though a better writer of characters.