Echo of Worlds

Here is a book that I have been eagerly waiting for some time, and now find very difficult to review. Mike Carey’s Pandominium duology is not two separate novels, it is one long novel split in two for publication purposes, and with some shock reveals at the end of part 1 that make talking about part 2 in a spoiler-free way quite challenging.

OK, let’s start with a recap. Infinity Gate introduced us to a multiverse in which infinite versions of Earth exist and where intelligent life has taken very different evolutionary routes in each universe. Two of our heroes—Hadiz and Essien—are humanoid. Of the other two, Moon is a felid (a cat) and Topaz is a lagomorph (a rabbit). The cast also includes Rupshe, an AI accidentally created by Hadiz, and a second AI whose identity is revealed in the first book.

The primary source of conflict in the books is the fact that there are some worlds in the multiverse where the dominant form of life is mechanical rather than biological. We thus have conflict between the Pandominium (a vaguely democratic association of worlds inhabited by biological lifeforms) and the Machine Hegemony (a collection of worlds inhabited by a hive mind of intelligent machines). Both sides believe that the other side is inhabited by creatures that class as vermin rather than self-aware intelligent entities, and so both sides want to utterly destroy the other.

The points that Carey is making here should be obvious, but he’s not doing it in a preachy way so you don’t feel that you are being hit over the head with the message.

Infinity Gate takes us through the initial discovery of the true nature of the book world, and conflict that is about to engulf it. Echo of Worlds is about the efforts that our heroes make to avoid that catastrophe. Do they manage to do so? Yes, of course. Are billions of innocent lives nevertheless lost in the process? Also yes. This is space opera. You can’t get by without destroying a few worlds.

There is only one significant new character introduced in Echo of Worlds. This is Mother Mass, not quite a living planet, but absolutely a planet inhabited by a single, enormous biological entity. She (they?) is the sort of thing I can imagine Kirk and Spock encountering in Star Trek.

The way in which the plot is resolved should be fairly obvious early on, though there are some good shock reveals along the way. What is more interesting is the way in which you start to see how everything has been carefully set up from the beginning. It is a masterful exercise in plotting.

Those of you who enjoyed the relationship between Hadiz and Essien in the first book may be disappointed that it has no further to go, but then how could it? Of more interest in book two is how Essien becomes more of a conscience for Moon who, being feline, has a passion for killing things with extreme prejudice. However, the primary focus of book two is on Paz. She turns out to be rather more competent than one might expect for a sixteen-year-old girl, even one who is a rabbit, but she’s a great character so I didn’t mind too much.

Overall this is a very fine pair of books, and I’m rather sad that we won’t be able to treat them as a single work for award periods, because a single work is undoubtedly what they are.

Title: Echo of Worlds
By: Mike Carey
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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