Fantasy Book Critic: Infinity Gate by M. R. Carey (Reviewed by Shazzie)

OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: M. R. Carey has been making up stories for most of his life. His novel The Girl With All the Gifts has sold over a million copies and became a major motion picture, based on his own BAFTA Award-nominated screenplay. Under the name Mike Carey he has written for both DC and Marvel, including critically acclaimed runs on Lucifer, Hellblazer and X-Men. His creator-owned books regularly appear in the New York Times bestseller list. He also has several previous novels including the Felix Castor series (written as Mike Carey), two radio plays and a number of TV and movie screenplays to his credit.

OFFICIAL BOOK BLURB: INFINITY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.

The Pandominion: a political and trading alliance of a million worlds – except that they’re really just the one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an AI threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they’ll eradicate it by whatever means necessary, no matter the cost to human life.

Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth’s environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel. It could save everyone on her dying planet, but now she’s walked into the middle of a war on a scale she never dreamed of.

And she needs to choose a side before it kills her.

FORMAT/INFO: Infinity Gate is the first book in the Pandominium duology. It was published by Orbit Books in the U.S on March 28th, 2023 and in the U.K. on March 30th, 2023 in hardback, ebook and audio formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: If a book has anything to do with the multiverse, I'll want to read it. If it is M. R. Carey writing a book, I will read it. This book ticked so many boxes, and taught me to add a few new ones as well.

Where do I begin? I have a very hard time collecting my thoughts about this one, and I mean this as a compliment. First let me get it out of the way that I did have a hard time settling into this book, and it only worked for me on the second try. But this is also how I've found some of my best reads, and this was no exception. It's a bit of work since there's a lot of ground to cover before everything clicks into place, and I did find that I needed to take a few breaks to let everything I read sink in, and then it truly became enjoyable.

The author presents a world (or existence?) in which there are infinitely many earths that are part of an alliance called the Pandominion, which governs trade and resource flows between them. I applaud the author for the way he simply explains the mathematical concept of infinity. This is done in a particular conversation between two characters in the book, scientist to layman, in a way that impresses upon the latter the vastness of the this alliance. Throughout the book, he very beautifully constructs his multiverse to represent other associated ideas without throwing mathematical jargon at the reader. He tackles the concept of countability with the Pandominion being able to assign identifiers to each of these known worlds. Continuity is also very impressively represented by showcasing how each of them can have very minute differences. The idea is that travel to all of them is possible by changing the size of the step you'd take, and the smaller it is, the less you'll have to acclimate to the Earth you stepped into, and there are just as many of them as there are continuous numbers on a scale between 0 and 1: infinite. Forgive me if I got a bit too math-ey on this one, this book uses many concepts in a way that I never thought I'd see happen.

The story starts in Nigeria on Earth, where scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is stuck in a research facility. All she wants is to survive in a planet effectively destroyed by multiple factors like war and climate change, and resource contention is so high that there seems to be no hope for the planet, or humanity as a species. She starts experimenting and invents step-travel, or teleportation, and invests in establishing that to solve everybody's resource issues. Small problem, the Pandominion is already aware of what she discovered, and does not like it.

While this story starts with Hadiz, it quickly escalates into one that involves a large set of characters from different Earths. Some of them are similar, others very different, and they all have such different life experiences. They're of different ages, and are all not even human. The book is told in chunks of consecutive chapters that follow each of them, by an omniscient and mysterious entity, and this works well because the narration is distanced enough that it can be concise, and yet paint a good picture of the lives they led, and everything they go through. Sure, parts of it are heavy on other kinds of science, and I'm not sure how much of it will stand up to scrutiny. I didn't even understand all of it, it was a bit dense in places and might not be for everybody, but I enjoyed how the author dug his heels in, and still managed to cover so much ground in just over four hundred pages. It definitely felt longer, and at times, I did question if this book is really only part of a duology.

It's a complicated setting, has complicated characters, and comes with complicated conflicts - intrapersonal, interpersonal, known, previously unknown. No matter what the Pandominium thinks they know, do they really know everything? There are so many conflicts on different levels in this book. Each of the characters have deeply personal reasons to want certain things, but it is clear that they don't know who the real enemy is, or what's actually coming for the alliance. I knew they had to interact with each other at some point, I could just never imagine how. Since a lot of the worlds and cultures involved in the story are very technically advanced, there are constant discussion around the subjects of conscience, sentience, and ethics.

The beginning of the book might seem a bit exposition-heavy, but trust me when I say that sticking with it helps. Given the huge cast of characters, I believe the author did his best to condense as much information as possible to make the story seem extra real, and honestly, I'm not sure anyone can do this better. I read the book over a long time myself, and the payoff was worth it. It is clear that a lot of research has gone into writing this, and I respect not just M. R. Carey, but the full team that worked on it, given the sheer audacity of this setting. And given the way the book ended, I am impatient to get my hands on the sequel.

CONCLUSION: For the math-loving reader, this book is an extravaganza.

Don't care about it as much? There's enough here, and a lot more, to impress you and make you hope that pre-orders for the sequel are already available. I am personally glad I took my time to marinate in it, and it has cemented M. R. Carey as one of the most versatile authors I've read.

What he has done in just this book is as immeasurable and overwhelming as the concept of infinity.