Yet what really drives the book are themes on the nature of identity, of privilege and exclusion, of the cost of survival and the reality of choice.įor example, the title, ‘The Space Between Worlds’ seems to me to refer not only to the gap between the worlds of the multiverse but to that feeling of having one foot amongst the privileged and one amongst the excluded and no longer feeling at home in either so that you feel like an imposter in your own life. There’s lots of action, lots of surprises and strong, memorable characters. Cara has survived and is trying to earn citizenship that will grant her permanent residence in the walled city she works in, freeing her from the poverty and physical hardship of the desert community she came from. People with the odds stacked against their survival across the multiverse. So travel between worlds created a demand for what Cara call ‘trash people’ like her. As Cara explains, if you’re rich in this world, you’re likely to be rich in the parallel worlds and so your counterparts are likely to be alive. Cara is valued as a traveller between worlds because although she is young, her counterparts have already died in 372 worlds. The background to the story is a future earth with the technology to enable travel to hundreds on the nearest parallel worlds in the multiverse but you can only travel to a world where your counterpart is already dead.
It was a novel about social exclusion, told from the point of view of someone who started amongst the excluded but who has been allowed to live among the privileged because has something that they need. From the beginning, it was clear that ‘The Space Between Worlds’ wasn’t that kind of book at all. In other words, a comfortable, enjoyable, dramatised thought experiment.
I’d gone into the novel ready for one of those Science Fiction stories that use time travel or, in this case, travel between parallel worlds in the multiverse, to set up mysteries to solve while sharing reflections on history, culture, causality etc. That was my reaction immediately after I finished reading ‘The Space Between Worlds’. Great storytelling, lots of surprises and lots to think about.
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