Doomsday Game
by Gary Gibson
E-book, May 1, 2019
Brain in a Jar Books
ISBN: 978-9574364589

What if you could jump instantaneously not just between planets, but between universes? And in each alternate universe find strange creatures, arcane inscriptions, and mysterious ruins? Earths destroyed by water, Earths broken by ice, Earths poisoned or blasted by gamma rays or threatened by meteor collisions or nuclear war.

The inhabitants of Earth – our Earth – have a problem. Our home will soon become uninhabitable, and a small group of Pathfinders have been seeking a solution to rescue seven billion humans from certain death. And they think they’ve found the answer: Terra Nova, an alternate Earth that has never seen the rise of humanity.

Other alternates were found in even worse condition than our own, but Terra Nova is pristine, and ripe for the taking. The governments of Earth have put aside their differences and pushed for the creation of a mass transport hub to shift the supplies and infrastructure necessary for humanity to survive.

In this, the final installment of the Pathfinder trilogy, the road to this goal is anything but easy. There seem to be shadowy factions in government working toward their own ends; sabotage and murder and clandestine operations threaten humanity’s very survival.

My impression of this book is that it is too intricate to sufficiently seize hold of the reader and carry on a gripping narrative. The plot developed more slowly than I would have liked. That said, the narrative is well crafted, and while I came to the novel not having read its two precursors, it does stand alone really well.

I also feel that the style didn’t suit the genre. In a hard SF landscape you come to expect a brittle brilliance of style, and edge-of-your-seat storytelling, and that was missing, here. It does however lead into interesting thought experiments, building backgrounds and drawing threads of narrative toward a definitive conclusion.

The idea of bringing together a team from alternate universes to save humanity in at least one, is thought-provoking. So much could go wrong in a planetary biome, and this book explores a few of these possibilities. It’s sobering in a way to think of how blasé we are about the only known habitable planet in the galaxy. This book takes away that expectation and pushes another reality: the search for a new home.  It will take you on an interesting journey, and if you like worldbuilding, plot twists, and subterfuge you’re likely to enjoy this trilogy.