Book:The Long Earth

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The Long Earth
Co-author(s) Stephen Baxter
Illustrator(s)
Publisher Doubleday
Publication date Jun 2012
ISBN 0857520091
Pages
RRP £18.99
Main characters Percy Blakeney, Monica Jansson, Willis Linsay
Series The Long Earth Series
Annotations View
Notes with Stephen Baxter
All data relates to the first UK edition.

Released 21 Jun, 2012 in the UK. A Science Fiction novel in collaboration with Stephen Baxter. It is based on a pre-The Colour of Magic concept then called The High Meggas.

Blurb

The possibilities are endless (just be careful what you wish for...)

1916: the Western Front, France. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where has the mud, blood and blasted landcape of No man's Land gone?

2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Cop Monica Jansson has returned to the burned-out home of one Willis Linsay, a reclusive and some said mad, others dangerous, scientist. It was arson but, as is often the way, the firemen seem to have caused more damage than the fire itself. Stepping through the wreck of a house, there's no sign of any human remains but on the mantelpiece Monica finds a curious gadget - a box, containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a...potato. It is the prototype of an invention that Linsay called a 'stepper'. An invention he put up on the web for all the world to see, and use, an invention that would to change the way mankind viewed his world Earth for ever. And that's an understatement if ever there was one...

...because the stepper allowed the person using it to step sideways into another America, another Earth, and if you kept on stepping, you kept on entering even more Earths...this is the Long Earth. It's our our Earth but one of chain of parallel worlds, lying side by side each differing from its neighbour by really very little (or actually quite a lot). It's an infinite chain, offering 'steppers' an infinite landscape of infinite possibilities. And the further away you travel, the stranger - and sometimes more dangerous - the Earths get. The sun and moon nearly always shine, the basic laws of physics are the same. However, the chance events which have shaped our particular Earth, such as the dinosaur-killer asteroid impact, might not have happened and things may well have turned out rather differently.

But, until Willis Linsay invented his stepper, only our Earth hosted mankind...or so we thought. Because it turns out there are some people who are natural 'steppers', who don't need his invention and now the great migration has begun...

Steppers found they could step east or west of datum earth, then...

Characters

Things and Concepts

Locations

Extra

The retailer Waterstones exclusive 'Metallic' edition contained the extra short story The High Meggas.

The Long Earth: First Person Singular an excerpt from the book released on the stories page of Stephen Baxter's website.

Annotations

Later editions of the book corrected the blurb to begin with the year 1917, which is the correct year for the battle during which Private Percy is said to have vanished.

Gallery

First Edition Cover by Rich Shailer
Book Proof
Slipcase Collectors Edition
Metallic Edition
Audio CD


Previous book

First book

The Long Earth Series Next book

The Long War