Review: The Long War

The Long War by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm lukewarm about this book. The first one was so, so good and kept me interested the whole time, and I'm pretty sure that if I'd picked this one up cold I would've put it down after a few chapters. The characters aren't as solid - many are muddy, undefined and out of nowhere, with either little or no payoff to their plot. In fact, at least four characters don't get a real plot; their stories go "get in an airship, travel, get to location and see thing." Joshua Valiente's story (one of maybe three characters with actual plots) doesn't start until about halfway through the novel, and even then it's mostly about traveling through the world. Which was really cool in the first book, but that journey had a point *and* it was the first we'd seen of the Long Earth. Now we're already familiar with a lot of the characters and the setting and even most of the politics of this world, but the whole first half of the book is establishing setting and character again. And the new characters are hardly given a proper treatment here, with Helen (actually in book 1, but a slightly larger character here) being nothing more than a nagging wife who fears her husband will be taken away "again" (although his last journey was before they ever met, so...?) and who despite all the awkward buildup is irrelevant after about 150 pages. The Reverend Nelson, also introduced last book, has a similar buildup with no actual impact on any event in the story. Two characters from Happy Landings get a tour of the East Earths, and NOTHING HAPPENS except that we see more Earths and hear that there is life on some iterations of Mars. And the climax of the titular "Long War" is resolved without a single shot just by literally showing up to a place, the conflict with the trolls is solved by Lobsang giving a speech once they find a bunch of trolls (though he could've given it to any group of trolls, because as we know, the long call eventually gets to every single troll in all the Earths). All of that combined with a major foreshadowed event happening in the last chapter of the book gives this book a crippling second-in-a-trilogy feel (though there are more than 3 in the series), with nothing actually happening except for some more cool travel and species reveals (though I could've done without the beagles, and also, why reveal those to us in the first goddman chapter? Finding out there are other sentient species would've been much cooler if we'd seen it grow out of the plot and not just had it thrown at us in the first few pages out of context!) and a political climate change that sets the stage for the next story. And on top of everything, it could've used some serious editing. There were a bunch of times where the same sentence structure was used 3 or 4 times within two paragraphs (i.e. "Well, ..." or "Of course, ...") and a lot of the prose just sounded awkward. All in all, a disappointing follow-up to one of the more intriguing stories I've read in a while, but it has some more cool iterations of Earth so it's okay I guess.

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