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All These Earths | Rating | |
| C | |||
| F. M. Busby | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
Faster-than-light travel has been discovered. They call it the Skip Drive, and it works by suppressing your appearances in the universe as it blinks on and off. The universe blinks, that is. The problem is, doing this too much makes the ships tend to Drift between universes. You can go to the stars, but you'll never return home again - at least, not to your home.
The book was first published in 1978, and it kind of feels like it. It has the simplistic, straight-arrow kind of plot that it seems to me was common back then. The book is fairly short, barely over two hundred pages, and is further divided into four parts. The first, at a bit more than thirty pages, details the discovery of the problem with Skip Drive. The others are about twice as long and are about a character that wasn't even in that first part (although he is related, in another universe) as he uses courier cans - very small ships with high Skip rates, and correspondinly high Drift.
The book, though, lacks any overarching plot. The four parts are four stories that are related but independent. I wouldn't be surprised if the book was published in sections in some magazine, though nowhere can I find mention that this was done. I can deal with this, except the stories were really quite similar: ship goes somewhere, lands, and we go through an explanation of Drift - the first time to the main characters, in the other three the main character explains it to the planet he landed on. In two of the stories the characters are essentially held hostage by people demanding use of their ship. Also, there are several spots where action threatens, but the characters manage to put a stop to that nonsense! The story is generally pretty sedate.
Most disappointingly, while the worlds have major changes, they occur due to minor decisions: they decide to colonize this world instead of the other, or a character is dead here because they got on a train that crashed. There is only one planet where there is a major change in the sociality of the place, and it is visited only briefly near the end. This is not Sliders, where one section deals with a world where, for example, the Nazis won and are colonizing space. It makes the travels seem almost mundane. What do we care that this character died or that one now has no children? Give us something we can relate to!
The novel came across to me as more an exploration of a concept than an actual story. Busby thought of the concept and just started writing, letting the characters tell him what they would do next. Sometimes this works, but this time it doesn't. The individual stories were all right, but nothing special; the book as a whole is something of a wash.
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