The Long Earth begins by trotting out a classic SF trope: eccentric loner scientist X devises an Amazing Machine with Unexpected World-Changing Consequences. This one lets people “step,” ie, step into a parallel adjoining earth, and step easily, with barely a pop. Moreover one can just as easily step into the next and the next and the next, although one generally has to do so in that order. (You can’t hop from World #1 to World #1,000 without going through all the intermediary ones first.)

The machine is so simple to make that a trip to Radio Shack plus a potato is all you need. Mr. Eccentric Scientist puts the schematics onto the net, and the next thing you know, millions, mostly high school nerds, are popping into adjacent parallel worlds. But the curious, and disappointing, thing about authors Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter’s parallel worlds are that they’re almost entirely empty. Idyllic nature, for the most part, unspoiled as yet — or rather undespoiled as yet —  by man.

The hero, teenage loner Joshua Valiente — the Biblical moniker plus the wordplay on ‘Valiant” says a great deal about authorial subtlety here — goes on a journey to see what he can see, accompanied by “Lobsang,” a Tibetan reincarnated as an AI, who plops himself into various computer systems, ambulatory dummies, and the control panel of a grand dirigible named after Mark Twain. On they sail through literally over a million parallel worlds. None is examined in any great detail, and a rather boring sameness creeps in — even the hero says, explicitly, that he is bored with the journey on more than one occasion, surely a bad sign.

Of course, the scientist vanishes mysteriously (Valiente hopes to meet him, but apparently that is reserved as bait for Volume Two). Of course, the hero meets the scientist’s daughter, and romantic tension develops. Of course, there are trolls and elves, Mr. Pratchett’s stock in trade, with Mr. Baxter on hand deploying evolution to give it all a scientific veneer. Of course, there are thrilling chases, hair’s-breadth escapes, nuke-wielding terrorists, and ultimately an encounter with a mysterious otherworldly transpersonal ameboid World Mind, giving us a whiff of religious chills to match the secular thrills. Of course it’s all rather enjoyable.  I won’t deny it: it’s fun; a welcome break.

Yet… I have no respect for this book. It’s lazy. Lazy, and a distraction. Not lazy technically: as a novel the book is well paced and holds interest and the characters are decently drawn and fairly amiable company.  But by and large it’s not a matter of pace or characters, much less conflicting characters, which is to say of conflicting values and opinions: it’s just a matter of passing through world after empty world, going “ooh” at the big ocean in the middle of this America, and “aah” at the icy snowscapes and comet craters covering that one.

Pratchett & Baxter, probably nudged by their publisher’s marketing department if not the Zeitgeist, feel the urge to end with a bang, so sure enough a terrorist with a suitcase nuke is dragged in at the very end for the”thrilling conclusion,” and, true to the continuing-serial three-part-trilogy model relentlessly urged on writers to push sales, the book ends on an unresolved note geared to get you to buy the next volume. In short it’s something of a cheat.  The usual cheat, the one that caters to our tastes and not our needs.

The virtue of parallel world literature is that it envisions another way of life: not alternative worlds but alternative societies are its heart and its value. We see what is possible — what our societies might become, whether for good or ill. The promise is that we will emerge with greater insight into our world, or at the very least into our hopes and fears. The Long Earth reneges on this promise. What it gives us is the American frontier, recycled. Have we fucked up the world, left it polluted, gutted, over-populated, unjust, unequal? So what? The Long Earth only gives us the classic American Pioneer response: pull up stakes and go somewhere else!

In real life, of course, there is nowhere else. We’re stuck here, and if we’re going to survive we need to address the inevitable problems that that involves, and address them fast. The Long Earth doesn’t address them in the least. People just run away, and live off the fat of other lands. What does the imploding population loss do to the society back on Earth Prime? As with the exploding population issue we actually do face, existing society barely gets a glance. Who knows or cares? We just want to get away from it, not face up to the hard work needed to fix it and learn to work together to solve our problems.

That’s a given in The Long Earth. Social solidarity is not a virtue, not even a consideration. The joy of escape — escape into fantasy — is all that counts. Thus the infinity of worlds in The Long Earth presents us with an endless series of happy theme parks, where every human society is a Jeffersonian farm minus the slavery. Not once do we see a parallel community that is a fundamentalist Jonestown hell, a totalitarian Maoist satrapy, an Islamofascist ghetto, a polluted capitalist cesspool, not once do we even see an Middle Eastern or African village style community. It’s all as the Weird Al Yankovitch tune has it: an Amish paradise. I suppose one must concede that there is implicit social criticism in the book’s assumption that certainly the vast majority of people would rapidly abandon their lives here in exchange for farming virgin worlds. Who wouldn’t rather be down on the farm than behind the counter at McDonald’s, much less behind barbed wire in Palestine?

This American pioneer vision is further aided by stand-in Indians, the Trolls, a near-human — but of course not quite human — sub-species with whom the expanding settlers sometimes fear and sometimes kill but mostly get serve as diversion and entertainment. And too, there is the looming temptation and threatening specter (and literal headache) of the Group Mind, the tribal/Commie surrogate Americans regularly need to measure their sturdy individualism against.  The American perspective and even language use is so relentless that that one wonders that “Sir Terry” Pratchett and fellow Brit Stephen Baxter should serve up such flawless Americana.  I caught only one unalloyed Britishism in the whole book.  Ghostwriters behind the curtain, perhaps?  After all, as with so much else in modern capitalism, it’s all about the label.

When science fiction delves into  societal reflection, it takes one of two paths: one involves a hard-eyed realistic attempt to describe and deal with present and future challenges. 1984, in this respect, remains the dark prince of parallel world science fiction, presenting an alternative society that was all too possible and that still remains a possibility. The other path is the path of fantasy, fantasy made plausible by an essentially magical technology, in which subjective dreams and unexamined world-views are given palpable form.  Often the latter masquerades as the former.  Much of today’s hard-bitten military science fiction, foreshadowed by the paradigmatic Starship Troopers, embodies this approach. “We are the good guys! We are under attack by The Bugs! The Bugs are Evil! Let’s kill ‘em all! (But let’s feel just a little bad about it, to show we have some depth, unlike Them.) Hooray for Us!”

The realism here is nil — what technologically advanced star-faring civilization is going to go to pay the staggering price of traveling the gargantuan number of light years involved in getting here just to mine our all but depleted minerals and trifle with our women?  But as metaphor it works magnificently, colorfully and vividly expressing the mindset of a population panicked by terrorism — a panic that very usefully serves additional interests: mindless conformist patriotism, higher taxes, support for more military and defense industry spending. Sure enough, the next novel in the series is The Long War, in which, I understand, the American story continues, settlers exterminating and exploiting trolls, and one freedom-loving alternate colony breaking away from the taxing tentacles of the Mother Country. Tea party, anyone?

Clearly The Long Earth is in the fantasy category. It tells us next to nothing about how this world operates, and nothing whatsoever about how to get out of the terrifying mess we face. It just reminds us how nice it would be to run away. And indeed, yes, it would be nice to walk out of Radio Shack with ten dollars worth of parts and find a potato and vanish forever to a bucolic glade, which is why reading such a book is, admittedly, rather a pleasure. But it’s a deadly pleasure, rather like taking a vacation from a war-torn land. When you come back home, it’s the same old ruins, just worse.

There are no solutions in The Long Earth, only distractions, those poisoned apples that media outlets in modern society love to provide.  But the habit of running away from one’s problems is a bad habit; sometimes a fatal one. The Long Earth may entertain, but the real Earth is on too short a fuse for such distractions.