Our discussion of The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter

Co-Authors / Plot / Characters / World

The group was in agreement that The Long Earth was more Baxter than Pratchett, although we noticed when Pratchett’s humor surfaced like with the mechanical cat or the religion called the “Cosmic Confidence Trick.”

We felt that Baxter is better at worldbuilding but not as strong on characters as Pratchett. The little vignettes of other lives didn’t really go anywhere, like the Reboot community, Monica Jensson, and the Civil War soldier who was left hanging for hundreds of pages. Sally’s character also wasn’t fleshed out enough to make sense of why she would be jealous of Joshua being the “chosen one.”

We noted that Joshua administered the Turing test on Lobsang repeatedly to try to figure out if he was “human” or not and when Lobsang said or did things just to annoy or anger people, he was said to have passed the test. Some questioned the lack of information about Lobsang’s motives and his true character and wondered what he was really up to – hopefully something more interesting than taking over the planet in all its manifestations. 

Some felt the journey in the dirigible was a little tedious and lacking in plot points. It took a while before there was any hint of menace – we kept waiting for the other shoe to drop: is Lobsang unstable? What is his plan? What about danger from trolls, elves, and First Person Singular?  

We liked the idea of “stepping” into the parallel worlds, but why go to earth one million? Some of us thought that the pressure building in Joshua’s head meant that he and Lobsang were circling back closer to Datum Earth the more steps they took, but then that didn’t seem to be the case after all.

Taking care of the environment would become a moot point since there is a seemingly infinite supply of pristine earths just a step away.

Some noted that the difficulty faced by the “pioneers” was really understated - it’s hard to build a community out of nothing and survive. Failure would be rampant with individuals and groups returning to Datum Earth even with access to maps and detailed information about locations.

Twenty-first century blacksmiths were finally vindicated in their career choice!

The book didn’t explain why iron couldn’t be transported to other worlds – one hypothesis was that the inability to carry iron was related to the aversion of fairies to iron which is said to either be poisonous or may be used to break ties with the world they left. [I’m not sure how iron is used by fairies to break ties with other worlds, but this seems relevant!]

Please add any additional thoughts or comments you may have about The Long Earth. We gave this title the codes DRG, LEL, BAC, CUL, and ROB with an average rating of 3.7.