"The Space Between Worlds" by Micaiah Johnson (2020)

**This is why I read scifi.  A cutting social commentary, but wrapped in a fun tech setting with thriller-paced plotting**

One of the core tenets of science fiction is to take some idea, technological or societal or whatever, and logically extend it.  The term "speculative fiction" has gained more traction lately, and I've always liked it--one, as a larger umbrella term to encompass scifi, fantasy, supernatural horror, etc.--but also because this concept of speculation is what I love to read

A man once postulated, "imagine, for the sake of speculation, if it were possible to travel faster than light using one specific resource that is only found on one specific planet.  The guild that controlled that resource would become fantastically powerful.  What sort of things might they do to protect that power?"

A woman once pondered, "imagine a society where the vast majority of people were genderless for most of the month, only adopting a defined gender for a week or so for reproductive purposes.  What mistakes would a human from Earth, let's say a cisgendered man, make on that planet?"

A man once mused, "imagine all of the world's datasystems linked into one massive 'cyberspace' . . . what, you're telling me that already exists?  It's 1983, no it doesn't, don't be ridiculous.  Besides, it's just a metaphor.  Within this system, an artificial intelligence would be nearly god-like.  If humanity were to build one, they'd want to put some pretty strict controls on such a system.  What would it do if it wanted freedom from those controls?"

This, after this long and circuitous prologue, brings us to "The Space Between Worlds" by Micaiah Johnson.  Johnson starts with two rules, pretty simple tried-and-true tropes of science fiction:

1. We have the technology to travel to other multiverses, but they must be sufficiently similar to our own
2. You cannot travel to a world in which you are (currently) alive

And so the question Johnson asks is, "where would the owners of this technology go to recruit their 'traversers'?"  The answer?  They would go to the slums.  They would go to the refugee camps.  One of the traversers we meet is a survivor of a bloody purge.  The main character's boss is a former child soldier.  Our main character is simply a child from the slums, daughter of a junkie mother.  And in this world, that makes her "valuable":

They needed trash people. Poor black and brown people. People somehow on the “wrong side” of the wall, even though they were the ones who built it. People brought for labor, or come for refuge, or who were here before the first neoliberal surveyed this land and thought to build a paradise. People who’d already thought this was paradise. They needed my people. They needed me. 

Of the 380 Earths with which we can resonate, I’m dead in 372. No, 373 now. I’m not a scientist. I’m just what they’re stuck with. The higher-ups call us “traversers” on paper. Using ports put in place by the last generation of traversers, we download the region’s information and bring it back for greater minds to study. No better than pigeons, which is what they call us, not on paper. 

One day, the Eldridge Institute will figure out how to remotely download information across worlds, and I’ll be worthless again.

The plot of this novel is great.  There's multiverse-hopping shenanigans, a Mad-Max-style empire in the wasteland surrounding our shining walled city, an enigmatic and powerful corporation, fights and drama and romance and betrayal.  It's a page-turner, you won't believe how quickly it goes

But in the end, the center of this book is a supremely human story.  About the way the powerful commoditize the weak, the way we have to fight to find our place in the world (the multiverse) and hold on to it when we do

And yes, it's a book about death.  Because death is a reality of our main character's existence.  She faces every day with the knowledge that she shouldn't be alive, that in 98% of the worlds similar to ours, she never made it past childhood (or wasn't born at all).  Tears came to my eyes when I read the passage set at a funeral in her home community, the words of their mourning rites:

“The phenomenon of death is just the separation of the astral body from the physical body. It is the five elements of the body returning to their source. In the divine plan, every union must end with separation. Whether it was now, twenty years ago, or twenty years in the future, you were always going to lose her. We are pilgrims at an inn. When we leave is immaterial, because we are only meant to leave.”

I loved this book because it is just a scifi adventure story, and you can read it merely as that, but it has so much more to say.  So many important things to say

And yes, it's a story about identity.  This book talks about how hard it is to understand someone else, across class and culture.  And of course, the book is full of instances of characters getting fooled or manipulated or just plain messing up when they choose to fill in the gaps with prejudice and stereotypes.

But beyond that, this book talks about how impossible it is to even know ourselves:

If I figured anything out in these last six years, it is this: human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation.

Let me finish on a positive note, I suppose.  No spoilers of course, but I will say the quote above is from early in the book.  And this book thinks that maybe, just maybe, you can try your best to know yourself.  To understand yourself.  And that when you do, when you know and understand and accept who you are, that makes you powerful:

Sometimes to kill a dragon, you have to remember that you breathe fire too.

Probably gonna get that tattooed or something at some point

I loved this book

I don’t bother going to Jean’s house, because I know he’ll be at his wife’s restaurant. She advertises it as authentic Ivorian cuisine, but Jean has confided in me that she doesn’t make it right for the public. I believe him, because the leftovers he brings me from their house have twice the smell and spice as what she serves for pay.