The darkness is worth it, because I know what waits on the other side.” (P. It’s a space between worlds, no different from the star-lined darkness I stand in when I traverse. I live in Wiley but I’, legally still Ashtown’s, and neither has a claim on me that counts. In four more, I’ll be pronounced citizen. “I’ve been in Wiley City for six years as a resident. In this dystopian future earth, where technology is advanced but humanity is as socially and morally backward as ever much of the time, people either live in the glossy, clean, rarefied surrounds of the cities like Wiley, or in the smoky, dusty surrounds of placed like Ashtown and the Rurals. While she never meets herself on her visits to these alternate earths due to the fact that it is only possible to travel to an earth where your doppelgänger or “dop” is dead (failure to observe that non-negotiable rule leads to messy, rather fatal consequences) – thus avoiding messy and psychically disruptive existential run-ins – she is constantly battling with the fact that she doesn’t really belong in the city that is now her home.

It can provide the kind of safety and security of which adventurous, well-lived lives are made, it allows us to explore and express who we are without fear of sanction or condemnation, and it instils a sense of shared humanity through which powerful connections are forged and lives changed.Ĭara, the protagonist of Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, spends her days on missions to the 380 visitable sister earths of the multiverse courtesy of brilliant inventor Adam Bosch (who has grown rich off his unique invention) is well aware of the multitudinous benefits of knowing you are part of somewhere and connected to people that matter, but as someone who routinely finds herself displaced from the world she calls home (aka “Root Earth”), she is also painfully cognisant of the harsh reality that even the strongest sense of belonging can be fractured by the smallest of changes and by secrets so corrosive they can’t help but eventually out.

(cover image courtesy Hachette Australia)īelonging somewhere, truly belonging somewhere, is a powerful thing.

The space between worlds review