The Long Mars

I got this book with some misgivings - but it was like teh Dune series; you KNOW they're going downhill, but you have this fatal fascination with the characters and the universe, and surely things can't get too bad??

The good news is they didn't: this breathed new life into the Long Earth series for me, as it explored the Long Mars. Baxter and Pratchett managed to recapture my enthusiasm, and interesting new things happened, and other characters were explored - even though the deus ex machina gambit was pulled again, as the original Stepper inventor was pulled out of hiding to do his inscrutable thing. However, it doesn't detract (too much) from the storyline.

What does jar a bit is how they dealt with The Next - the smart kids who look on us as children. They REALLY got to rescue them as easily as they did? Really?? The episode where it happens looks a little too much like something that got rescued as the book needed to go to print, from an unresolved plot development.

You know, I though this had to be the last one: Terry Pratchett had died, there was evidence from the last book that things were possibly not as tight as one would have wanted from a writing team - and some of that showed through here. THEN I found there was ANOTHER one...!