World Walkers product reviews

Many years ago, while doing book reviews for a local newspaper, I stumbled across one of Neal's books set in the Polity universe. It hooked me from Chapter 1, which was a surprise since I had been told that the only reason I got the book was that no-one else liked his stuff. At the time, it caused me to start reading with a negative bias... which thankfully vanished pretty quickly. Since then, I have tracked down and read almost everything Neal has written, including an orphan that I loved so much and deeply wished to see more of.

That title was "Cowl" and it had, at its heart, a tale of reality-jumping agents trying to set a particular "possible" timeline to be the dominant one somewhere downstream. Without reviewing that book in detail, it's hard to express the aspect that really grabbed me, but I can say that it was about that time in my life that I started to realise my thoughts didn't run on the same rails as many others, and that perhaps the world as I saw it wasn't quite the same picture others saw. This title really spoke to me on a deep mental level that words can't even approach, let alone express.

Years passed, many wonderful and thrilling tales ensued, and then another interesting universe came out of Neal's fertile mind, that of The Owner. A trilogy of titles set in a dystopian future where Earth has finally become a unified, no longer comprised of Nation-states, but instead ruled by a monolithic, and utterly corrupt, global dictatorship. In that world, technology and biology finally meet on the battlefield of the mind, and a hybrid form of life is created - NetLife. A human mind, amplified and fortified by advanced software running in synergy.

But how do these disparate stories relate to this title? Simple... it is set in a multiverse, centred around the version of Earth as writ large in The Owner trilogy. Biotechnology has supplanted "hard" tech as the new binding force between biological lifeforms, and a future-evolved form of humanity appears and... well, somewhat-blindly futzes around and finds out. The definition of 'humanity' starts to blur, paranormal capabilities start to manifest, people live and people die... classic Neal Asher. Thrilling, engaging, intelligent and thought-provoking.

What I have to love about Neal's work in general, is that he takes today's science and tomorrow's hopes, extrapolates them out in a number of different ways, then somehow locks on to the one that is the most captivating and really starts to go to work on messing with your head... in such a great way! I always find myself asking odd questions while reading Neal's works. Usually those questions revolve around topics of morality and wisdom of action. With much sci-fi and fantasy, I find myself asking "but how does that work, exactly? Why don't you explain it? I have to assume that the author is either too lazy to explain, or doesn't really know how it might work and chalks it up to "Tah Dah! Magic!" I have never found myself asking that more than once for any particular "science" in his books - he makes an effort to explain it, at least as far as current science will allow, and has some handy in-universe tricks to cover the rest.

In this particular story, there really isn't too much 'super-science' to explain, because while the explanations offered don't really stack up under the laws of physics as we know them today, there's also nothing in there that isn't a fair approximation of what could be made if the tech from today is expanded and extrapolated out under a decent research budget, for a century or so. We are already working on molecular machines, aka nanotech. Get nanotech working on living tissue and you have biotech. We're not too far from that already.

Understanding the concept of higher-dimensional realities - be they parallel or branching - makes the rest of the story's under-structure acceptable and easily imaginable. The small hint of time-travel thrown into the story helps too, though I have to admit I did find it a bit kludgy when he talked about a multiverse detaching from a greater dimensional weave and sent crashing "back through time" to "smash into" another multiverse. You really have to start stretching metaphors to wrap your head around that, but I used a cruise ship as an analogy. The "nodal world" that is the focus of a multiverse, is the cruise ship itself, and the shadow worlds - the almost-but-not-quite-the-same echoes of the nodal world - would be the lifeboats. All the same rules apply on them as on the main craft, and the crew wear the same uniform, but it's not the same ship and each has differences.

I am not too sure how to score this one really - for me, it's another hit. Grabbed me, I felt immediately at-home reading it because I knew it was set in a close-match to a 'world' I already knew well. It also has that multiverse schtick that gives my mind something juicy to bite into. But it's also a huge diversion from Neal's usual fare, and while it harkens back to - and feels like a spiritual sequel to - Cowl and The Owner series, it also feels like it could easily spin off into a divergent universe as distinct from them as they are from each other.

Overall, I'm a fan. I love it, the high-brow science that is hinted at in the background without ever coming forward and swamping the story. The moral conflicts and the clear exposition of "information doesn't equal wisdom" that more people ought to really get to grips with, make for a story that engages on more than just the surface "spaceships and aliens" level. It's a story that, if you let it, will get you thinking about what is going on in the world today, and how it could go if we don't wise up, deal with the oligarchy, and get back to putting in some effort to being decent people again. This title won't appeal to everyone, but if you like authors that make you think while also entertaining you... this is a good title to get.