S. Zainab would like to think she bleeds ink but the very idea makes her feel faint. She writes fantasy and horror, and is currently clutching a manuscript while groping in the dark. Find her on Twitter: @szainabwilliams.
You have not time warped, it is 2025, but I want to rewind and look back at my favorite science fiction book of five years ago. Once in a while a book comes along that makes you worry that nothing else you read again will ever be as good. That’s how I felt about Micaiah Johnson’s debut novel.
I really love a twisty plot and I love a mashup of mystery and science fiction. This book isn’t outright space mystery, but it has a sort of thrilling Memento-flavored vibe. More than that, it explores the complexity and complicated nature of identity and place, and how class plays into both. Johnson sets a sleek, hypermodern city against a Wild West/Mad Max wasteland and centers a character at odds with the place she once called home and how the dust of the wasteland sticks to her.
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
Why do Cara’s multiverse doppelgängers keep dying? What is the Eldridge Institute really doing with all that multiverse data? Why won’t Cara and Dell get over themselves and get it on? These are the questions that kept me turning the pages, and Johnson’s ability to thread a nuanced story involving many worlds and timelines into a thrilling cinematic space adventure made this one of my most memorable science fiction reads of all time.
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S. Zainab would like to think she bleeds ink but the very idea makes her feel faint. She writes fantasy and horror, and is currently clutching a manuscript while groping in the dark. Find her on Twitter: @szainabwilliams.
Cara grew up in the wastelands, the dusty resource-desert the lower classes call home, but now, as an important commodity to the Eldridge Institute, she lives in Wiley City where the skyscrapers loom tall and the streets are fully swept. But Cara’s path to citizenship is tied to dangerous work traveling the multiverses and gathering data for the Institute. This is how she learns that survival makes her unique among her doppelgängers, who seem fated to die young, and valuable to her employer which seeks access to as many alternate worlds as it can reach. But there’s one mysterious Cara death among the many that catches the traverser’s attention and makes her wonder if there’s something more urgent and personal to be learned from her assignments, and if the game afoot has broad and catastrophic implications.
Beyond Cara’s survival instincts and tenacity giving scenes that thrilling edge, the chemistry between Cara and her handler, Dell, crackled on the page. I kept anticipating scenes between the women, and that moment where flirtation blossoms into romance. Moreover, they symbolize that being allowed to live in Wiley City doesn’t mean you’re given the same privileges and standing as your neighbors, or that people will forget or won’t care where you came from. Cara certainly can’t. Expect a hearty helping of commentary on class with your thrilling adventure, and when you’re done with this book, you can immediately pick up book two, Those Beyond the Wall.
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