Dimensions and Societies Generate Horror Through Nonsense

Yet another great cover. This one also uses a mutation of photos by bending them, but also adds glows with the strings that representative of magical connectiveness. Images are stretched and bent and otherwise manipulated in a curious way. The design succeeds in pulling the eye between the different places displayed: desert, forest, and city. This design is by Kathryn Galloway English. Her Facebook page shows her drawing with a pen on a large pad.
“From bestselling authors Darkly Lem…” I thought the s in “authors” was a typo, but no, “Darkly Lem” is a pseudonym for five authors: Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull, and M. Darusha Wehm. Their website lists one previous book they published together: an anthology of stories. The unifying element is that they mostly live in Durham, or Raleigh North Carolina. Eure and Turnbull are literary award-winning editors of Many Worlds. And Wehm has also been nominated for top awards, and has published some sci-fi popular novels. It is strange that these five authors decided to work together. I can’t imagine splitting novel-writing between five different people…
“…The first book” in a promised series with “a… multiverse of adventure and intrigue… Over thousands of years and thousands of worlds, universe-spanning societies of interdimensional travelers have arisen.” The term “interdimensional” never appears in the body of this novel… “Dimensions” does thankfully appear, in lines such as, “Sensing in three dimensions… Everything is all tangled…” No clarification is given why somebody cannot distinguish these three dimensions from each other, if they can travel between them… Later a more mundane mention describes “a three-dimensional tree of the data Duncan… pulled out…” In the second half of the novel, a character objects: “I can’t understand all that six-dimensional, multispacial nonsense.” This seems like a confession that the author doesn’t understand dimensional travel, and pretty much never addresses what this means, how it’s done and the like across this narrative. The surrounding lines are generic stuff that can be in any text, such as, “I don’t think I can.” When these authors attempt to be deep, they say things like: “he knew more about the true nature of reality than almost all of the trillion people of this universe, had even been to a half dozen worlds beyond the veil, but for all that extra-dimenational knowledge…” his life was worse than “the average Avancorpo junior executives”. This is all incredibly dull and unreadable.
“Some seek to make the multiverse a better place, some seek power and glory, others knowledge, while still others simply want to write their own tale across the cosmos. When a routine training mission goes very wrong, two competing societies are thrust into an unwanted confrontation. As intelligence officer Malculm Kilkeneade receives the blame within Burel Hird, Roamers of Tala Beinir and Shara find themselves inadvertently swept up in an assassination plot.” There has to be an “assassination plot” in this plotline because otherwise these guys are talking about cross-dimensional travel without coherently going anywhere. If there is an assassination; this at least lets the writers point to this as a climatic incident: formulaic box checked for the presence of death-fearing tension. “Meanwhile, factions within Burel Hird are vying for greater control over their society in a war of cutthroat machinations—at a heavy price. Elsewhere, two members of rival societies lay their own plans for insurrection—with ramifications that will ripple across the Many Worlds…” What? Earlier in this blurb there was a reference to “two… societies”, now these are the same two, or a different two?
The opening sections seem to deliberately confuse readers with vague references to cryptic societies, and the “Authors’” relationship to them. This is followed by a long character list, with too-brief descriptions of who they are. I’ve seen enough… Not recommended.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024

I really liked this book! I definitely see the potential it has for becoming a successful seriers. This book covers a wide array of themes in the science fiction world, and it touches a bit on everything, and I can see the growth potential for sequels and series following up on these topics. It was so fun to read, I liked the way it was written, and I am going to keep my eye out for any other books from this author!!

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complementary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

A bit of a mixed success, but overall an intriguing start to a series with potential.

This collaborative multiverse world-building/writing project has a lot going on - multiverse philosophical and ontological implications; coups, assassination plots, conspiracies, and subterfuge; "many worlds" travel/transference - and as a consequence, there is simultaneously a lot to get excited about and a bit that feels under-developed. Which is fine for the first book in an eventual series, but I think it's fair to note that this is *particularly* true for a book of this nature.

At its best, there are thoughtful, creative, eloquent explorations of the nature of being and identity in a multiverse reality. There is complex politicking, ideologically distinct factions rivaling and coexisting, intimate emotional moments of family and partnership and loneliness and grief, and a sense of fragile balance with the (many) world(s) at stake. But the potential behind both the creative exploration of ideas and the plot often takes a back seat to developing so many things at once, making progress feel slow. I like a slow, thoughtful book, but this felt like it wanted to be faster paced than it was actually being at times.

After a rocky start with sci-fi names and world building deluge, I do think this ended up being well-written, doesn't have any of the consistency issues I was worried about with five authors co-writing a book. I'm not huge on heavy (collaborative) world building or multiverse stories, and politicky space opera is hit or miss, so I'm compensating for my preferences by giving this a slight bump - if those buzzwords work better for you than for me, this is probably closer to 4 stars than 3.

This was a strong start to the Formation Saga series, it had that element that I was looking for and enjoyed the overall feel of this world. It uses the multiverse element that I was looking for and enjoyed the overall feel of the world. Darkly Lem has a strong writing style and was glad I got to read this.

An absolutely mindbending science fiction novel set in a complex multiverse. This book is dense (like a rich, tasty cake is dense), it is intricate, it is at times jawdroppingly strange (and I mean that as a sincere compliment), and it kept me hooked through all its twists and turns by telling a vast and complex story through the singular lives of several different people. The close focus on the motley crew of characters, from bureaucrats and spies, to academics and fighters, makes the story feel both vast in scope as you glimpse the immense multiverse through their eyes, and intimate, because you see the impact of ruthless political feuds and violent power-struggles on the people caught up in the midst of it all.

With body-hopping multiverse travel, fights in taverns, robots and aliens, harrowing escapes through multiple universes, fantastical worlds, and lots of intrigue and betrayals, this book is heavy with ideas. It also manages to have a real sense of humour AND pack an emotional punch as characters ponder the nature of identity, love, existence, fate, and the nature of the universe itself.