James Nicoll Reviews

2023’s Infinity Gate is the first volume in M. R. Carey’s Pandominion paratime series.

The universe-spanning Pandominion is vast, wealthy, and powerful. The Pandominion’s power rests in part on control of Stepping, controlled travel between timelines. Unsanctioned Stepping is investigated.

Hadiz Tambuwal, formerly of Lagos’ Campus Cross, discovered Stepping too late to save her Earth. Stepping allows Hadiz to relocate to a nearby but less doomed Lagos, where her research continues. Consequences ensue.

Unaware of the Pandominion, Hadiz has been methodically mapping alternate timelines. Unaware of the Pandominion, she takes no care to keep her activities covert. Her intrusions are noticed.

Eventually, Watchmaster Orso Vemmet is dispatched to investigate, accompanied by troopers Sostenti and Lessix. Vemmet, Sostenti, and Lessix encounter Hadiz just as the scientist is confounding an attempt by her greedy boytoy’s Essien Nkanika to steal her work and maroon Hadiz in a parallel timeline. Mistakes are made, Hadiz is left for dead, and Essien is shanghaied to the Pandominion.

Vemmet discovers too late that his team made a number of irreversible egregious errors. Vemmet’s coverup fails because, unbeknownst to him, Hadiz’s mapping project resumes. Vemmet is reassigned to a hell-world by his displeased superior. Sostenti’s permanent file now requires that she be given only the worst assignments. Lessix alone escapes punishment, but not for any reason the trooper would consider good.

The Pandominion’s exploration stumbles over a barren world occupied only by robots. This world is only one of a vast number of such worlds. To the Pandominion’s considerable alarm, they realize that the robots are not, as the Pandominion assumed, the servants of unseen biological masters. The robots are an autonomous collective. Convinced this state of affairs could only have arisen by a robot uprising, the Pandominion dubs their new enemy the Ansurrection and goes to war. A few million dead troopers (Lessix included) later, the Pandominion realizes it underestimated the Ansurrection.

In the paranoia-fueled cold war that ensues, young Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills inadvertently befriends the wrong classmate. Now a wanted war criminal, Topaz goes on the run from the authorities and towards a fateful meeting in Lagos.

~oOo~

This is where I complain about SF authors and scale. Those of you who find this tedious should go listen to Chappell Roan songs for a few paragraphs. Roan’s songs are very catchy!

The problem with paratime settings like this one is that there are an infinite number of timelines, continually splitting as all possible variations of each event occur. Therefore, it doesn’t make any sense that Hadiz is unique. Each second would have trillions of branch points¹. There should be legions of Hadizes. As well, every single variation of her encounter with Vemmet and company would have occurred. As well, every single variation of the Pandominion-Ansurrection interaction should occur, from final war to touching romance.

Carey is not the first author to run into this issue. An early H. Beam Piper Paratime story also featured a vast number of slight variations on the unique First Level timeline from which Piper’s protagonists hailed. Piper’s solution was the same one to which Carey resorts: ignore the vast numbers of timelines that are continually appearing and pretend there are a narratively-compatible finite number of easily distinguished timelines. The alternative is an infinitely long novel, which would be a daunting challenge for current book binding technology.

On a related note, ape-descended selfs (intelligent beings are called selfs by the Pandominion) are but a small fraction of the Pandominion population. Other Terrestrial lineages are more likely to produce selfs who do not kill themselves off as soon as they invent higher technology. This matters little to the narrative, as all of the characters are functionally indistinguishable from humans, at least as far as cognition and culture goes.

Of course, it would be hard to form a government from beings who cannot easily grasp how their fellows think. It may be that this aspect of the Pandominion is exaggerated by the narrator. It is a plot point that the Pandominion consciously restricts its recruitment efforts to timelines of comparable technological sophistication and that previous outreach to a very alien entity was rejected, so it would make perfect sense that the government also restricts members to species whose cognition falls within a narrow range of behaviors. Why not? They have infinite candidates to consider.

This novel starts off as post-apocalyptic fiction, swerves into military SF, then into espionage thriller, and finally ends as a chase novel. It follows a comparatively large number of viewpoint characters: Hadiz, Essien, Vemmet, Sostenti, Topaz, and a narrator whose identity is a spoiler. Most of these people are self-serving idiots (as is the senior administration of the Pandominion itself). Many of the unlikeable characters proceed to step on avoidable rakes.

Gate is less a novel and more the first volume in an ongoing series. As such, it does not offer a conclusion so much as an astonishing revelation I saw coming about a quarter of the way through the novel.

As consequence of the army of viewpoints, the book seemed a bit long for its plot. That said, the pace is brisk and the narrative held my interest. I managed to read the entire 533-page novel in a single evening, which I can tell you is not a common occurrence these days.

Infinity Gate is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Which isn’t stuff on the scale of ​“did Hadiz opt for black coffee that morning or add cream?” but very small-scale events like atomic decay.