#Infinity Gate

[ninja-muse]

Another month, another last-minute book review, but don't let that fool you. Infinity Gate is a winner! It's also pure Carey—compelling characters, smart world-building, themes that drive at the heart of human experience, writing and story that just don't stop.

First of all, if you've seen the blurb for this book, you probably think it's about the potential benefits of parallel worlds to one devastated by climate change, or possibly that it's about people fighting sinister AI. This is, in fact, what hooked me. It's also fairly inaccurate.

This is a story about how we define "human", that gets more into the discussions we're having about fascism and dehumanization and xenophobia, than the discussions we're having about AI, algorithms, and where "tool" becomes "crutch" or "means for layoffs". Does a person have to look like you to be seen as an equal? Do they have to act like you? Think like you? If they don't, is it okay to oppress, enslave, or murder them? If you say no but your society or government says yes, what then?

(Unsurprisingly, this is also a novel about control—who has it, who doesn't, who wants it, and why.)

But! The parallel worlds and the fights about AI are no less interesting, exciting, inventive, or important. It's clear that Carey's thought through the usual parallel-world-story premise of "if every turning point sparks a new world, then anything could happen" with more creativity and more clarity than most other authors. Yes, there's a world of civilized rabbits, but it's not a happy, cute world because no matter the species, people still have wants and fears and assumptions. Yes, an interdimensional empire would be pretty great in a lot of ways, but it's also run by, you guessed it, people.

I'm making this sound like a thinking book, not one where things happen. So let me clarify: THINGS HAPPEN. So many things. A lot of happening. There's a physicist who cracks interdimensional travel, which doesn't go as she planned. There's a guy on the fringes of society who's faced with hard choices. There's a schoolgirl, and a government bureaucrat, and a military unit, and meaningful friendships, and a prison planet. There's a conspiracy that maybe isn't, and a conspiracy that definitely is, and a questionable war, and all sorts of AIs. It's frankly surprising how much Carey manages to fit in 500 pages, and how he gets it all flowing and making sense and never once losing track of his story and message.

Which is also not to say I thought this book was perfect. It's sometimes a bit too messagey. The characters, while rounded and believable, sometimes fit the themes a little too neatly. There were bits I read faster less because I wanted to know what happened and more because I didn't quite care about what was happening just then. I am, however, perfectly willing to believe a lot of that's because I can't divorce "reading-me" from "literary critic/editor-me" and that other readers will not have these problems, or these levels of them.

The important thing is, though, that this book was fun. Fun and smart and full of SF coolness and unpredictable and well-written—and pointed, angry, punchy, thought-provoking. Everything good science fiction should be, in other words, and I don't know if anyone could've done it better. The sequel went on my TBR as soon as I saw it announced.

[lhs3020b]

Infinity Gate, by MR Carey

MR Carey's "Infinity Gate" is perhaps one part Charlie Stross's "Merchant Princes" series, one part Gary Gibson's "Extinction Game", one part "Everything Evyerwhere All At Once" and one part completely its own.

SYNOPSIS

Out in a world not a million miles from ours, Hadiz Tambuwal is a scientist. She lives on what could be best be described as a late-stage Earth. She has what in context is an extraordinarily-privileged life, working as a researcher at a billionaire-funded campus just outside of Lagos. Officially, the projects at Campus Cross are special Moonshot-type endeavours, aimed at finding solutions for the raft of problems that their world is sinking under. Outside the walls of Campus Cross, it's awful, and things are only getting worse. The pollution crisis is so extreme that the air itself is going bad, no-one on the evening news would be so uncouth as to utter the word "famine" but food prices are only moving in one direction, international tensions are spiralling and the whole planet is sliding into dissolution and chaos.

Hadiz responds to all of this by keeping her head down and cloistering herself into her work, to the point where she stops even leaving Campus Cross in the evenings. You'd think this would cause more problems than it does, but as time goes on, fewer and fewer of her colleagues come into work. This is a bit surprising given that Campus Cross still has reliable electricity, potable water and warehouses full of stored food but who knows what's actually going on? Not Hadiz, she's very good at being oblivious when it suits her.

She's doing research into dark energy, which she thinks there might be a way to capture and harness. If possible, this could provide the world with a clean, non-polluting source of energy and could be the first step to pulling the entire planet back from the brink of societal collapse. (Whether the billionaires who run Campus Cross are actually interested in that … well, it's not entirely clear that they are, and there may be some hints in the novel that actually the projects are not intended to save the world, perhaps merely them.)

Hadiz doesn't find a new power source - instead, she accidentally finds something else instead, namely the technology required to Step between alternate Earths. Alternate worlds exist, many of them habitable but without human life. Very excited, she thinks she's found a way for people to at least flee the dying Earth on which they live - but before she can announce the discovery to the world, the brewing international crisis boils over and the capital-A Bombs start falling like the rain.

(Interestingly, the bombing seems to completely bypass Lagos, otherwise Hadiz herself would certainly have died. Given that less important targets get nuked early on, the omission of the capital city of the most populous country in Africa does seem a little odd. If one were a conspiracist, one might almost wonder whether the billionaires had something to do with that.)

Then one day, the Internet goes off.

As far as Hadiz can tell, she's alone. She may well be the last living person on her Earth. (In fairness she seems to consider it likely that there are some survivors somewhere, but she has no way of telling if there are indeed any, for a fact.) In the absence of anything else to do, Hadiz carries on her research and starts mapping alternate realities.

Given the multiplicity of universes, it would be a bit odd if no-one else had ever had the same ideas that she has, and indeed they had. There is an entire cross-universal civilisation out there, calling itself the Pandominion, and in Hadiz's travels, she unknowingly stumbles into their territory. This in turn draws the attention of Watchmaster Orso Vemmet and his boss, who are functionaries in the Pandominion bureaucracy. Initially, Hadiz has no idea that her activities are being monitored. She finds out after she and Essien Nkanika, another human from a somewhat-less-apocalyptic timeline adjacent to her own, Step themselves into an ambush.

Unfortunately, whilst it has a high opinion of itself, the Pandominion is not a nice society. It's idea of diplomacy could be summarised as "double tap", except sometimes its Cielo soldiers are too lazy and complacent to actually bother with the "double" bit. This comes back to haunt them later on - a lot of the plot could have been averted if troopers Moon Sostenti and Lessiz had bothered to make sure that Hadiz actually was dead after they shoot her.

But it gets worse.

Shortly after randomly-not-quite-mudering Hadiz and abducting Nkanika, the Pandominion discovers a continuum populated by robots. Being the society it is, the Pandominion immediately manages to semi-accidentally start a war with them. It then turns out that the robots are themselves a pan-universal society, and one that may in fact be larger than the Pandominion itself. Whoopsie.

Much as things spiralled out of control on Hadiz's Earth, a bad situation is about to get a lot worse for the Pandominion.

COMMENTARY

This is a fast-paced, page-turner of a novel. One interesting aspect is that while the characters have agency and can make meaningful choices, nonetheless they also have limited knowledge and limited analytical power, and are very prone to making mistakes. Unintended consequences are the rule of the day here, from Hadiz herself bunkering down while her world collapsed to the gunboat diplomacy that is apparently Standard Operating Procedure for the Pandominion. Also, while the book is rather jaded about human society - we come off pretty badly in a lot of timelines! - nonetheless, it doesn't fall into the trap of lazily assuming that "different" automatically means "morally superior".

The Pandominion, frankly, is a shitshow.

If I had to describe it in elevator pitch style, I might call it the Imperium of Man with mid-2000s iPod branding. It never seems to think twice about shooting first, and on numerous occasions directly makes trouble for itself by doing so. It's completely-murderous toward inhabitants of the so-called "sinkhole", that being timelines outside the region claimed by the Pandominion. Depending on how you interpret the Traskom arc, there's an implication it may even be actively-genocidal. Also, while the Pandominion cultivates a post-scarcity internal image, it does this through a particularly-warped form of paratime imperialism. Basically, there's plenty of pollution and environmental degradation, likely to levels even worse than that on Hadiz's Earth, but the Pandominion does it on worlds that don't have permanent citizen populations. (Traskom, again, is an example here. The planet is described as so ruined by Pandominion heavy industry that it's actually worse for visitors' health than Hadiz's murdered Earth(!).)

We learn relatively little about the actual character of the Pandominion regime. There is apparently an Omnipresent Council, which seems to technically be the ruling body, and it's implied that its membership are not hereditary. Whether they are elected, appointed or co-opted in some manner isn't clear. The Council exists in an awkward symbiosis with the Cielo, which is the Pandominion military. Some passages of the novel can be interpreted as suggesting that the tail is actually wagging the dog, and outside the veneer of formal constitutionalism, the Cielo is the real ruling power inside the Pandominion.

Regardless of who wears the proverbial trousers, being a Pandominion citizen doesn't seem to bring a lot of rights with it. If you are one, the main "benefit" seems to be that on a good day, the ruling elite will just about tolerate your physical presence within the region of total space that they consider theirs. On a bad day, well, anything goes, really. We see lots of people get subjected to various official enquiries and disciplinary processes in the novel, but notably none of them receive anything like any sort of recognisable due process. Justice is apparently whatever the Cielo trooper pointing a gun at you thinks it is. There's also a suggestion that education is heavily propagandised - the school that another character, Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, attends seems to push certain narratives concerning the perfect goodness of the Pandominion and the Cielo, and the perfect badness of anyone and anything outside their sublime realm. There's also a suggestion that the arts are censored, or at the very least subject to a culture of stiffling conformity. (Topaz's mother in particular suffers because some of her work comes to be viewed as too radical for good-thinking citizens.) From what we see of the insides of Pandominion society, it also seems to be prone to moral panics, scapegoating and witch hunts.

If you want to look for the positive points, they're probably that there is apparently no gender/sex-based discrimination, and at least technically, the society is a multiethnic one, uniting multiple species that evolved on varying different iterations of Earth. Other than that, though, the Pandominion is basically a lightly-veiled nightmare. You can probably live OK if you can keep your mouth shut, but good luck staying on that straight-and-narrow. Also, depending on how you interpret one particular conversation (concerning the Pandominion's use of shackled AIs), the entire economic system might be based on slavery.

As for the robot society, well, they have their own flaws too. They apparently can't grasp the idea that organic entities could be conscious. They make no effort to communicate, and while they don't technically shoot first during their first encounter with the Pandominion, nonetheless their behaviour escalates to violence much too fast too. They also respond by launching a campaign of kidnapping and abduction on Pandominion worlds, which obviously doesn't do anything to move public opinion in their favour. Again, "different" is not automatically "better".

It's a multiverse where people are very good at making messes and oh my! the messes they make!

CONCLUSIONS

This is a novel where a lot of people make a lot of mistakes, many of them driven by their belief that they are chessmasters with infinite wit, wisdom and vision.

Interestingly, some characters do manage to pull themselves out of their most self-destructive tendencies. Essien Nkanika has a near-breakdown early in the novel when he realises that the chain of bad choices that he calls his life has very nearly led him to his own destruction. Hadiz gets a lot more effective when she finally, belatedly, realises that she needs to work with people rather than just ignore them. Topaz finally manages to take the first steps toward an exit from her own personal mess when she begins to look a bit more critically at her own society, and starts to ask genuine questions about who really has her best interests at heart.

Some other characters don't. Later in the novel, it never occurs to Orso Vemet that he's being manipulated. Baxemides, his treachorous superior, never seems to realise that her own tendency to kick down at her subordinates has directly accelerated the Pandominion's crises. The Omnipresent Council seems incapable of grasping that maybe, just maybe, they've made some mistakes.

That, I think, is the core of what this novel is about. Choice, agency and self-destruction. Who are we if not the catalogues of our mistakes?

In the above write-up I've probably made it all sound extremely grim, and certainly those aspects exist. But it's a fun novel too. The characters' stories are sometimes cringe-inducing, sometimes terrifying, but it's never boring. It also manages to go through multiple genres in one novel - post-apocalyptic, military SF, slice-of-life, espionage, even a chase scene later on! While the characters can be exasperating sometimes, you also care about them and keep wanting to know what happens next.

This was the most entertaining book that I've read this year, and I can highly recommend it. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel.

[fantasyarcanum]

— Infinity Gate (Pandominion, #1) by M. R. Carey.

[rhetoricandlogic]

INFINITY GATE by M.R. Carey

RELEASE DATE: March 28, 2023

A desperate scientist. A selfish rogue. A caring child. And the fate of infinite realities.

At the beginning of this multiverse-spanning tale, an unnamed narrator tells us we’re going to hear the stories of three individuals: first, Hadiz Tambuwal, an accidental genius; second, Essien Nkanika, an impoverished man willing to do anything to survive; and finally, Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, a sentient rabbit whose choices changed the course of history. From that confident and intriguing opening, we jump right into Hadiz’s story.

She’s a scientist working in a research station in Nigeria who can see the end of civilization coming and finds it terribly inconvenient that this collapse might interrupt her work. She’s looking for dark energy but instead stumbles on a way to hop into alternate universes. We soon learn that thousands of these alternate universes are governed by an empire called the Pandominion that invented cross-universe travel long ago and doesn’t care for people making unsanctioned trips. But with Hadiz’s Earth in the midst of civilizational collapse and environmental catastrophe, she’s left with no choice but to hop sideways to another Earth—and unknowingly set in motion a reality-altering chain of events. The result is sort of a space opera that never goes to space, instead spanning thousands of alternate Earths, including multiple Earths where evolution took a different path and the dominant sentient species is descended from rabbits, hedgehogs, or others of our mammalian cousins. The plot doesn’t map onto a traditional hero’s journey arc and feels all the fresher for it. Short, action-packed chapters keep the pace brisk, and each character we meet, however briefly, is vividly and empathetically drawn.

A genuine treat for SF fans: an epic multiverse tale that moves like a thriller.

[venusbloo]

ARC Review: Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

**The links below are to the book’s StoryGraph page for reference. I do not receive any compensation from clicking these links!!** Book: Infinity Gate Author: M.R. Carey Pages: 496 Source: Orbit, NetGalley Publisher: Orbit Genre: Sci-fi Publication Date: March 28, 2023 Summary: From bestselling author M. R. Carey comes a brilliant genre-defying story of humanity’s expansion across…

[nevinslibrary]

Weird & Wonderful Wednesday

Why do I do this to myself? Right, so, Pandominion is a trade alliance that is full of a million worlds. That is, it’s full of a million versions of Earth (take that Marvel and DC Universes, yeesh….). Then there’s the threat that’s called Ansurrection, its own group of worlds, but those that are machine based not organic based.

Hadiz Tambuwal is a scientist who stumbles into interdimensional travel, and the war that’s happening between all these worlds. And boy, is it a complicated and twisty bunch of worlds that she steps into.

This is massive (and not surprisingly it is supposed to be a duology with the second one coming out in June). The world building is amazing, and, my second favorite part of the book was the characters. They all jump from the page and are all so unique too. I cannot wait to read the second book (even if it does melt my brain…)

You may like this book If you Liked: After World by Debbie Urbanski, The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao, or Wool by Hugh Howey

Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

[filipmagnuswrites]

A Gentleman and a Scholar's Short List of Books I Hope To Read Before Year's End

Hullo, hi, Filip here. I take this valuable reading time to notify you that I have a few too many books I’d like to read before the year comes to an end, and I’m, frankly, drowning under the sheer weight of paper stock. Prepare yourselves! Starling House by Alix E. Harrow The new Harrow novel is ace, and I’ll probably burn through it over the rest of the night because I am a maniac who cannot…

[zerotolove]

Four new books read in August:

"Infinity Gate" by M.R. Carey

"Her Majesty's Royal Coven" by Juno Dawson

"Good Husbands" by Cate Ray

"Normal People" by Sally Rooney

I enjoyed all four, but my favourites were "Infinity Gate" and "Normal People".

I also found out afterward that there was a limited series made based on "Normal People". I'm planning on giving this a watch soon.

[retrogamingblog2]

[thehumanwiki]

why are all of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon plots so batshit. like— “town is convinced you’re the harbinger of the apocalypse and starts a national manhunt to kill you.” “you come from a destroyed future and fight and if you solve the problem you get fucking deleted.” “you’re actually the tenth of so isekai protagonist they summoned but everyone else DIED.” “a being of pure hate wants to die because it’s being forcefed hate and tries to throw the earth into the sun. also it possesses your dad to send you HELL and you have to crawl put of it.”

[biblionerdreflections]

ALC Review - Infinity Gate

Today I'm reviewing INFINITY GATE by M.R. Carey. I didn't love this one, but it had some great world-building and a cast of fascinating, memorable characters. 3.5⭐ #BookBlogger #ScienceFiction #BookReview

Hello, everyone! Today I’m reviewing Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey. I was on the fence about requesting this one, but the premise of this multiverse story sounded so interesting. I just couldn’t pass it up, especially after I saw so many good reviews. Am I glad I picked this one up? Read on to find out! Continue reading Untitled

[fantasyarcanum]

“He had not given up hope that she might be alive. He imagined her searching the worlds for him. He saw her in his mind's eye, the finest of needles threading the coarse cloth of the universe. He thought she might come when he least expected, waking him from this strange dream with a kiss, whispering her forgiveness, bringing him home.”

— Infinity Gate (Pandominion, #1) by M. R. Carey.

[aimer-arts]

I find it really funny that everyone in Post Town is obsessed with Virizion EXCEPT Hero and Partner

[theeloquentpage]

Infinity Gate by M R Carey

New Review: Infinity Gate by M R Carey #scifi #InfinityGate #MRCarey #ThePandominion #review @OrbitBooks

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…

[venusbloo]

2024 July Reading Wrap Up

**All links below are to the books’ respective StoryGraph pages for reference. I do not receive any compensation for clicking these links!! How is it already August? I feel like this year has flown by so far, and while I read a ton in July, I once again did not stick to my planned reading. I did read some of what I planned, but I let a few other books go in favor of deep diving into a young…