THE IMMEASURABLE HEAVEN
CASPAR GEON
Solaris Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4.25* of five
The Publisher Says: An entirely alien cast race across the multiverse in search of a priceless map of the realities in this thrilling cosmic space opera!
The galaxy of Yokkun's Depth has been settled since time immemorial. There is only one frontier left, and it's a one-way journey: to pierce the skin of existence and delve the countless younger universes beneath.
Running through these universes is the fabled Well, a fissure formed in the distant past into which horrors have been flung for millions of years. Amongst their number was an impossibly ancient sorcerer, cast down into the wastelands of a thousand apocalyptic worlds, never to return.
Until now.
Whirazomar is crossing the stars in the belly of a sentient spore, hoping she can make it to the Well before her masters' rivals realise what she's hunting: somewhere far below them, a hapless explorer has drafted a map of reality. A map that the exile is sure to seek out. A map so valuable that a kaleidoscope of beings will run the gauntlet of every universe to get it, even at the cost of their lives.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: This. I mean. Story-bomb. Wow.
Okay. Trying to use my words here.
The multiverse is a real, traversable thing. It's hugely ramified levels of lightly interrelated alternate realities are exclusionary. Leave one, voluntarily or not, and it is forever after closed to you, so no return trips.
Of course that means the Big Bad is moving towards what is considered closed to it because stories need stakes. How is The Big Bad doing this impossible thing? Why we know, he was thrown out of his comfy home timeline for being a bastard and wants revenge. But this thing he's doing is impossible. Only it obviously isn't. He's really doing it.
The story, plot-wise, is pretty typical. The great pleasure of the read is the entirely not-human cast, the author's vivid (almost synesthetic) evocation of the many layers of the reality of these characters, and the really entertaining sense that he is actually experiencing this Well that leads down the layers of the multiverse in front of you. He *is* Draebol, who is charged with making the map of all the levels. (I am deliberately not using the in-universe words for these things. Some people are deeply turned off by "odd" names, and easier to woo into a strange story by stealthy temptations.) (I might have a way to go on the stealth skills.)
The first third is an infodump. I say this knowing how many of y'all will switch off now; I really hope you won't. There's so very much intense image-establishment in this infodump that I'd read fifty more pages of it. Just it. I mean, this never happens. It was as if Author Geon opened an animation studio in my head. I love that experience, being so irresistibly insistently precisely immersed in a realty decidedly not my own that there is nothing to do but go with it or get out.
I went with it, and think some of y'all...the ones who batten on Ann Leckie and Tamsyn Muir...will as well. What was not quite so effective to my way of thinking, and is that three-quarter-star's final resting place, is the very human wants and desires of the aliens. In a lot of ways, the needs and wants of the Teixcalaanis in Arkady Martine's books are more alien-feeling to me. I'm not really inclined to ring the tocsin for the read because, well, what an intense experience it was. How much I want more SF that does this...drops the reader into a sea of ideas and concepts and says, "now let's tell a story in here" so I get to feel the sensawunda I sorely lack in most of my reading in every genre.
More, please.
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