Reviews with content warning for Physical abuse - The Space Between Worlds

5 ⭐ CW: violence, death, murder, abuse, sex work, suicidal ideation

The Space Between Worlds by Michiah Johnson is a dystopian scifi story that is gripping and brutal. One of my friends has been bugging me to read this, and I finally got around to it. Let's just say this friend is two for two in the scifi recs.

Earth has figured out that multiverses do exist, and Adam Bosch has created a way to traverse them. The catch is that in order to travel to these other Earths, your doppelganger has to have already died. We follow Cara, a traverser that is special, because out of the 300 and some Earths, she has died in most of them.

As Cara traverses these different versions of Earth, she meets the same people living different lives, but discovers there are a lot of commonalities. Every world has a Wiley City, a walled city for the rich and elite progressives that denies access to those living in Ashtown. Ashtown, where Cara is originally from, is desolate and full of violence. When Cara starts to question why no other Earths have discovered how to travel, she finds herself enmeshed in corporate sabotage involving the multiverse.

This was such a brutal read, but it was also so beautifully written. We learn so much about Cara on Earth Zero as well as a lot about her other selves. We also get a thread about her being in love with her distant handler, Dell, but that isn't what it seems either. So much sapphic pining. I loved seeing Cara's character growth and her growing morals all while being tough and ruthless. There is some nonbinary representation on the side, but it was nice to see how it was integrated into the world.

I don't want to give too much away, but it's definitely worth the read if you were a fan of This is How You Lose the Time War (with less romance focus).

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gorgonzola's review

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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workingdaley's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I read this book for a book club that I was in, and I found it to be a fascinating read. Not my favorite by any means, but I find the concept of turning something as aspirational as dimension traveling into grunt work for the poor that (mild spoilers)

the rich are actively trying to replace

to be deeply interesting. It's one of the things that I love about Afrofuturism. It's important to take these concepts that we are aspiring to and consider who it is being built off of and what the consequences of that are for society at large. This book does a great job of exploring that.

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vitaminwaterfan's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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athnyx230's review

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reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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thenextbookdilemma's review

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Where do I even start with this book?

First it stretches your mind, as I think is always the case when parallel universes are explored. This idea challenges our very existences and always throws me for a loop

I, like many of you (probably…maybe?) have considered on multiple occasions the question of, how might my life have been different if X had gone differently, or if I hadn’t met Y, or if Z had happened ? Well, Cara knows the answer to that question in 372 different worlds.

A very brief summary: This book is about multiverse travel. A woman has died on 372 different parallel universes and thus is able to visit them and gather data for her home earth. But soon she discovers that she is involved in something far more nefarious than expected.

I LOVED this book. The characters and all their iterations were so interesting and human. The worlds were well-developed and captivating. There were multiple plot twists and a romance subplot that I adored. The writing was beautiful and impressive especially for a debut!

But this book also makes you think about who you are, and who you could have been.

Would I be the same person if my circumstances had been different? Johnson says no, and I agree. We are not our circumstances, but we are not unaffected by them. Who might you become if your means of survival are not provided to you? How can we judge somebody who has to fight to survive, who lacks the same amount of security as we do? Who doesn’t know where their next meal or a roof over their head is coming from? It’s a reminder that the family you are born into, the class, the race, the place, is all just luck. And that very truth can be humbling or infuriating or devastating. I loved the way Johnson wove these questions of equity and classism into a gorgeous multiverse novel and I will long think about all the Emmas I could have been or perhaps, all the different Emmas I am parallel to this one.

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schnaucl's review against another edition

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adventurous dark sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This wasn't quite what I expected. I was expecting it to be set on contemporary earth or maybe the near future. That was probably my fault for making an assumption and this misalignment of expectations may have influenced how I felt about the book.

The idea that travel is limited to a few hundred worlds because otherwise they're too dissimilar to the traveler's world (and that they can start closely aligned enough for travel but become misaligned enough to make it impossible) is interesting. And it doesn't seem tied to the particular traveler, the present circumstances of the Earth as a whole has to be pretty similar. Consequently, most people's circumstances are pretty similar from world to world. It's certainly different from most alternate reality books where someone tries on various lives completely different from their own (only to realize the life they'd been living was the best one all along). It does mean that big historical moments and conditions have to be somewhat similar. For example, just as a world with nuclear war would take itself out of alignment, so would one with much greater equality, where some of the biggest problems have been solved.

There's also some romance to it, the notion that the same people come together across multiple worlds. Of course, those relationships aren't always healthy sometimes they're quite toxic.

But mostly, of course, it's about exploiting other worlds. Obtaining resources the prime world can't (or won't) extract on its own. And letting things play out on other worlds so they can decide what to do (or not) on their own. It's not quite clear how the data the travelers retrieve is gathered, but I suppose that's a minor detail.

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