Book Review: Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

 

Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

544 pages, Paperback
Published: March, 2023 by Orbit

Mike Carey is a writer I have been a fan of since long before he was writing novels. His run on Hellblazer made me a fan instantly. Under his own name, he wrote a series of novels about an exorcist named Felix Castor. I have read three of those books, and they are good but at the time I kinda felt he was a better comics writer. That said he was good enough that when I saw The Girl with All The Gifts under the name M.R. Carey I checked it out and when realized it was the same author I read it instantly. I was glad I did because I felt That Mike Carey reached a new level.

The Girl with All the Gifts is what I would call an instant classic. It took a tired zombie genre and in injected new life with a high-concept premise and unique point of view for the narrative. I was not alone as this novel was written under a pen name (OK just M.R. instead of Mike Carey) as it became a huge hit, and the author was even asked to adapt it into a pretty solid movie starring Glen Close.
 
That is when M.R. Carey became the brand and a series of really good novels followed. Crossing science fiction, thrillers, and horror, the only thing that really unites the M.R. Carey books (let's just say MRC now) are high concepts. They work to various degrees and The Girl With All the Gifts is an example of the concepts working.  MRC takes massive and daring swings. This book Infinity Gate might be the most massive of swings.

Books that take high-concept risks are some of my favorite works of Science Fiction but authors who take risks sometimes write books that don't work.  For example, the last MRC book I read was the first book of the Rampart Trilogy the Book of Koli. The big swing in that book included a gimmick in the prose that didn’t work for me and I struggled even to finish that book while respecting the concept. I think readers who are not writers might not nitpick the nuts and bolts of the prose, but I just couldn't vibe with that book. Still, I respected the effort and the past work of MRC was strong enough that I jumped on Infinity Gate as soon as I could, I didn’t even read the back cover. I knew it involved the multi-verse from the tagline on the cover.

If you trust my reviews and want to go in cold let me start by saying this is one of my top reads of the year, and I think MRC’s biggest swing has led to him hit hitting the ball into the parking lot. For those who don’t like basketball analogies – it is great. As strange and out there as a novel can be and providing a new universe and experience that is bold as hell. It operates on so many levels in 500 pages that it has more themes and story potential than entire Science Fiction franchises.
 
The most impressive thing is making a story about the multiverse bold and original. Considering the massive success of Everything, Everywhere All at Once, Spider-Verse, Star Trek, and Marvel all doing stories about multiple dimensions. I am not going to spoil plot twists or final acts but this is your last chance to avoid the basics of this masterpiece. Hyperbole?  I know what the hell I am saying. I offered how skeptical I was of MRC’s last series to avoid any accusations of Hyperbolic fan-boying crap. That said in all the right ways I am jealous of this amazingly insane science fiction novel that creates a universe as vast as Dune while commenting on Climate Change, the Socio-political effects of militarism and colonialism, Artificial intelligence, Quantum Physics, Multiple Worlds theory, and the ethics of biological and technological created life.

It is a lot.  That is one reason this book is a magic trick.

Reading the book without the back cover, or any knowledge worked well as the first act, set up the mystery well, a scientist Hadiz Tambuwal in Legos Nigeria is desperate for a solution for the dying earth. Working with an AI she creates a device that will send her to another earth. She finds one that is unspoiled. She has a decision, use it as an escape, or become rich and exploit this other Earth the same as the one she is escaping. She starts to travel to many universes and that puts her on the radar of a more powerful force.

What happens to Hadiz feels shocking and she drops out of the book handing off the Point of view to mostly to Essien Nkanika who is an escort working the streets of an alternate Nigeria When Hadiz meets him. There are other shifting POVS so it is pretty seamless when Essien is drafted into the multiverse military force that he hands the story over to the next character, and this happens a few times in the book it is earned.  

Infinity Gate is a long book with several major characters including some of the different species on Earths with different evolutions. You see Hadiz learns that the multi-verse she just learned to travel has trillions of earths, each one different. Some evolved similarly, some radically different. In the first act, it would be easy to see this as the story of Hadiz, and it is. That said through a series of set-ups and pay-offs new characters enter the fray.

We should not overlook the most impressive thing that MRC is doing. What force did Hadiz wake up?

“What can be said of the Pandominion that hasn’t been said already?  It was an empire that governed trillions of selves on hundreds of thousands of worlds, yet all of them the same world – your world – your world as well as mine, the earth, in different causality and in different continua.”

One of the things that makes a Dune, Thrones Trek, or Wars franchise so vast and effective is the scope.  MRC by creating this multiverse model and with the Pandominion MRC has created a galaxy. For this novel and his characters to encounter his version of Klingons, Borg, or The Empire his characters never have to leave Earth. He can build a thousand worlds and species all on earth.

It is an absolute narrative magic trick to develop a universe in 500 pages that feels as lived in as any franchise with decades of world-building. MRC does this by shifting point of view between characters that include People, AI, Collective machine armies, humanoid rabbits, and cats who evolved on other earths.  

Consider this scene shortly after Essien is drafted into the Pandominion military. This is such smart writing.  Essien is a fish out of water, he is as new to this vast multiverse as we are...

“Men and women” was a broad term. They were roughly human in terms of body plan, but like Watchmaster Venmmet and Moon Sostenti, they were surprising in other ways. Many were furred, a few scaly or feathered.”

These characters like Paz (the rabbit) add to the odd and offbeat feeling of Infinity Gate. In this way MRC comments on how species develop and cultures themselves. Early in MRC’s novels (it is my memory and I could be wrong) he stuck to the first person in the Felix Castor books, and as incredible as Girl With All the Gifts was constantly slipped into present tense (that is on the editor in my opinion). Infinity Gate not only handles switching the narrative POVs but it makes the universe feel more epic because they feel like different books in those moments.
 
“Sentients on every world have this moment when they think intelligence is what separates them from the rest of creation. It takes them a lot longer to figure out that they’re arguing from the very heart of survivor bias, and therefore underestimating the importance of blind, brute chance.”

One of the things that really drives the book is the sense that the multi-verse itself is in danger. Once Step technology comes to a version of Earth they become part of a larger conflict. I wonder if the stakes will be clear for some readers, but once Hadiz steps into another universe she is seen as a risk to many, many worlds.

“But the Pandominion wasn’t made overnight, and it didn’t come without a cost. The first few parallel worlds that learned how to Step wounded and wasted each other in endless, unwinnable wars- Wars that were nothing but onslaught, since stepping made every square foot of ground a battlefront – until they finally came to see that infinity made war obsolete.”

One of my problems with the Garth Edwards SF movie The Creator was that the narrative needed less black and White in the characters. That movie suffered from having clear heroes and villains. Infinity Gate has a few clear protagonists but the sides of the conflict get blurry all the time. Shades of grey as it were.  

The unvisited worlds and concepts like people saying "Selves" instead of people are little examples of things the reader needs to adjust to.  Some of the "Rules" of this universe...excuse me Multiverse are like silly-putty. Not as bad as JJ Abrams having people beam across the quadrant in Star Trek Into Darkness, but remember in a multiverse story this is a feature, not a bug.

Without going into the concepts of the third act that nicely set up more books in this universe the Pandominion gets a rival to supremacy across the universes.  The Pandominion is a complicated democracy, not exactly ideal, so when the Annsecrection the antagonist develops the battle lines are as complicated as they are in our world.

Infinity Gate might be the best read I have had this year, in a year filled with super great reads just in modern SF alone. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, The Terraformers by Analee Newitz, Meru by SB Diviya, and Suborbital7 by John Shirley. Heck of a year.  I think only one of those might be better in my mind.