Obviously intended to be the first in a series, this collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, both award-winning science fiction/fantasy authors, has gotten rave reviews from a lot of critics. I'm a huge fan of Terry Pratchett, but this book disappointed me.
Yes the scope is epic and the premise is intriguing: the discovery of untold multiple versions of Earth and a means of traveling to them that involves a concept called "stepping," a kind of sideways movement between consecutive but differently-evolved realities.
Some of the elements are distinctively Pratchett, especially the potato-powered Stepper devices, the "trolls" and the "elfs" that inhabit the parallel Earths, even the cogito ex machina (formerly a Tibetan motorcycle repairman) named Lobsang who is the one of the main characters.
The rest of it is like a new fashioned Jules Verne novel, with long vistas of exposition occasionally interrupted by brief flashes of action. It just failed to float my boat.
