Feeling Bookish: Echo of Worlds, by M.R. Carey

A two-part story wraps up in satisfying fashion, with lots of action but a bit less provocation of thought in readers.

Echo of Worlds
By M.R. Carey
Published by Orbit Books, 2024
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Authors of sci-fi stories often come up with big fascinating ideas, and the best of them use those ideas to make people think about the world around them, the nature of humanity, or even the purpose of life or other heady concepts. However, these stories are more often an excuse to provide exciting action and compelling drama, and they may not fully explore the thought-provoking concepts they’ve introduced. But that’s the nature of telling good stories; ultimately, they’re supposed to be entertaining, so it’s hard to complain when they achieve that goal.

The first volume of M.R. Carey’s Pandominion series introduced a cool multiverse concept in which a vast empire spanning thousands of alternate earths came into conflict with an equally vast empire of artificially intelligent machines, and a few characters living on the edges of these societies believed that they were the only ones who could prevent a disaster that resulted in the complete destruction of both empires and the deaths of trillions of beings. It was pretty fascinating, especially in its exploration of the ways powerful governments exploited others for gain.

With this second installment in the series (which turns out to be a duology, rather than a longer series of books, unless Carey decides to come up with additional stories following the further adventures of these characters), we get less exploration of new, fascinating ideas. Instead, Carey turns to an exciting adventure in which the small group of characters he spent the first book introducing races to end the conflict between the Pandominion and the machine hegemony before they completely wipe each other out. And they’re definitely on the verge of doing so. The machines have decided to exterminate what they see as an infestation of organic life by deploying technology that literally destroys planets, while the Pandominion is about to unleash a weapon that sends a series of planet-wide waves that permanently cause electronic systems (and the brains of organic beings) to cease operating.

To try to stop these threats, our heroes (a teenage girl named Paz from an earth populated by rabbit-people; two soldiers, Essien and Moon, who formerly served in the Pandominion’s army; Dulcie, an AI that was formerly part of the machine hegemony; Hadiz, the digital consciousness of a former human scientist, and Rupshe, an AI system from that scientist’s world) make a last-ditch effort to find and contact the one being they think will have the power to prevent these doomsday weapons from being unleashed: the Mother Mass. That’s a concept Carey introduced in the first volume, being an alternate earth that was populated by a single being, a sort of moss-like substance that had grown to encompass the entire planet. It was something the Pandominion had encountered in the past and had quarantined, since it was so powerful that any attempts to contact it or destroy it had ended in catastrophic failure.

Much of this book consists of their efforts to find the coordinates of the Mother Mass, which provides a series of action-packed adventures as they attempt to infiltrate Pandominion worlds and access this secret information. Everything builds up to a pretty awesome climax, and while there is the expected last-minute save, Carey throws enough wrinkles and surprises into the mix to keep things interesting. He ends up delving into some ideas about the nature of consciousness and free will, at one point feinting toward the sort of story where characters encounter a god-like being and struggle to convince it to act. That can be an interesting concept in sci-fi stories, with characters who are concerned about the lives and deaths of regular people unable to comprehend things at such a large scale and beings of massive intelligence feeling that it is better to let what they perceive as small-scale concerns play out like natural forces. But it can also increase the scale of conflict beyond comprehensibility, so fortunately, Carey brings things back down to earth, so to speak, and lets the characters take a different approach to solving the problems they are facing.

If Carey has any sort of main theme he’s trying to convey here, it’s the need to not ignore the needs of individual people in pursuit of larger goals. Both of the players in this multidimensional war are doing that, having provoked conflict on a massive scale with little to no care about how their citizens will be affected. But our characters also encounter this issue in a scene in which they come across a village of survivors on Hadiz’s world who are struggling to scrape by after the planet-wide apocalypse. While Rupshe urges the rest of the characters not to worry about these people, since they are concerned with stopping a war that is currently killing people in the billions, Paz refuses to treat their lives as unimportant, and she pledges to offer whatever support she can. That sense of humanity (or whatever you want to call it when dealing with such varied forms of intelligent life) is the key to what makes this story work, and it also provides relatable stakes in a plot that deals with clashes of civilizations on scales that are almost incomprehensibly large.

Ultimately, that personal touch and the focus on the travails of a few relatable characters are what make this series work so well. Carey makes us care about these characters and worry about whether they’ll survive the various impossible missions they undertake. He also lets us see them grow and develop, although less so in this volume than in the first, since the plot travels at a breakneck pace as everything hurtles toward a last-ditch attempt to avert a disaster that would end thousands upon thousands of worlds. It’s a pretty fun ride, keeping things interesting up until the final pages. Carey seems to have figured out how to keep multiverse stories from feeling like nothing matters because everything is possible, and he provides enough of a character focus in the midst of large-scale action to keep the story grounded and make sure readers are invested in the outcome. If you’re looking for a good combination of big sci-fi ideas and relatable character work, this series delivers.