The Long War Review

The Long War review: an ambitious sequel about distance and power

This The Long War review finds Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter less interested in staging a conventional war than in asking what war even means when people can step into an apparently endless chain of parallel Earths. The result is a broad, patient sequel that converts the first novel's astonishing premise into a political and ecological problem. If land is abundant, what happens to borders? If settlers can simply leave, how does a government preserve authority? And if humanity encounters another intelligent species without first recognizing it as an equal, can expansion avoid becoming exploitation?

Those questions give the novel its real momentum. A generation after Step Day, communities have spread far beyond Datum Earth, the original human world. Airships connect distant settlements, cultures are diverging, and Valhalla—more than a million steps from the Datum—has begun to resist the reach of the old government. At the same time, the troll population is responding to human mistreatment. Joshua Valienté, now older and settled into family life, is drawn back toward Lobsang and the crises accumulating across the Long Earth.

The book is not a clean military thriller, and readers expecting armies to collide may find the title misleading. Its "war" is a struggle over legitimacy, language, movement, and who gets to define civilization. That conceptual reframing is the sequel's greatest strength. It is also the source of its unevenness: the story travels through so many communities and points of view that urgency repeatedly gives way to observation.

A sequel that makes infinity feel political

The Long Earth introduced stepping as a technological wonder: with a simple device, most people could move sideways into neighboring versions of Earth, none of which had developed human civilization. The Long War asks what comes after wonder. Exploration becomes migration; migration becomes settlement; settlement produces competing claims about law, representation, labor, and belonging.

That progression is persuasive because Pratchett and Baxter do not treat infinite territory as an automatic cure for human conflict. Material scarcity may ease in many places, but power does not disappear. Datum institutions still believe they can govern distant populations. Settlers still carry identities and resentments from the world they left. Distance makes central rule impractical, while the ability to move again makes coercion unusually difficult. The political imagination here is more interesting than a simple frontier fantasy because the novel keeps exposing the assumptions packed inside words such as nation, citizen, property, and independence.

Valhalla becomes the clearest test case. Its remoteness is not merely a number; it changes what government can plausibly mean. The settlement has enough time and space to develop its own civic confidence, while officials on Datum Earth continue to think in inherited categories. The resulting confrontation is often procedural, rhetorical, and symbolic. That may frustrate readers looking for combat, but it fits the book's core idea: in the Long Earth, controlling people is harder than claiming them on a map.

This is science fiction operating as a social laboratory. The speculative device is simple enough to grasp, yet its consequences keep branching. The authors are strongest when they follow one practical question into several surprising second-order effects rather than pausing to admire the size of their invention.

The trolls give the story its moral center

The political dispute surrounding Valhalla is only one form of conflict. The more consequential issue concerns the trolls, intelligent humanoids whose communal song links them across the stepwise worlds. Humans have too often treated them as curiosities, convenient labor, or animals. The trolls' response forces the novel to ask whether an expanding species can recognize intelligence that does not resemble its own institutions or modes of speech.

This thread supplies the book's deepest moral pressure. Human beings possess unprecedented room, yet some still reproduce the habits of conquest. The Long Earth does not make humanity wiser; it merely enlarges the field on which human generosity and carelessness operate. Pratchett's familiar suspicion of self-important authority is present, but the humor does not dissolve the ethical stakes. Baxter's interest in systems and long consequences gives the troll crisis a scale beyond any single act of cruelty.

The trolls also prevent the novel's politics from narrowing into a dispute among rival human jurisdictions. Valhalla wants autonomy from the Datum, but the desire of one community for freedom does not automatically make that community attentive to other beings. By holding those questions together, the book resists a comforting division between oppressive centers and innocent frontiers. Moral responsibility travels with the settlers, however far they go.

Some of the handling remains schematic. Individuals can function as representatives of an argument, and the cultural difference of the trolls sometimes serves the human cast's education more visibly than their own interiority. Even so, the novel's insistence on listening—and on the cost of failing to listen—gives its sprawling structure a coherent conscience.

Character, collaboration, and the deliberately distributed plot

Joshua remains important, but he is no longer the sole axis of discovery. His altered circumstances matter: the instinctive traveler now has relationships and obligations that complicate every summons to adventure. That tension is more compelling than a simple repeat of his pioneering journey. Lobsang, as ever, combines immense capability with a personality that makes certainty look both useful and dangerous. Their exchanges preserve some of the first book's intellectual play without pretending that their partnership has stayed unchanged.

Around them, the novel builds a larger ensemble and several traveling threads. This distributed approach suits a story about a civilization spreading across countless worlds. It allows the authors to show how different groups understand the same transformation. It also keeps the novel from settling into one dominant rhythm. A scene of political maneuvering may yield to an expedition, a comic encounter, or a sober example of environmental damage.

The collaboration's contrasting sensibilities remain visible in productive ways. The scale, logistics, and evolutionary speculation recall Baxter's systems-minded science fiction. The skepticism toward bureaucracy, the precise comic deflation of status, and the sympathy for beings dismissed by the powerful carry Pratchett's recognizable moral wit. The prose is generally accessible, and the humor is dry rather than relentless. Readers seeking the density of jokes found in Discworld should adjust expectations: this is a collaborative speculative epic, not a displaced Discworld novel.

The cost of the ensemble is emotional diffusion. Several promising people and places receive enough attention to become interesting but not enough to feel fully inhabited. Joshua's relative absence from stretches of the narrative can make the book feel like a tour of consequences rather than a sharply shaped personal story. For some readers that breadth is the attraction. For others it will confirm that the series values worldbuilding above dramatic concentration.

Pacing, structure, and the problem of the title

The novel's pace is exploratory even when danger is gathering. Rather than drive straight toward a single climax, it accumulates pressures across politics, ecology, and contact between species. The structure resembles a survey expedition: it pauses, notices, explains, and then moves on. This makes the world feel genuinely large, but it can also make the middle feel looser than the opening questions deserve.

The title intensifies that mismatch. "The Long War" suggests sustained military escalation. The book instead examines conditions that could produce conflict and the difficult work of preventing those conditions from hardening into catastrophe. That choice is intellectually defensible and thematically apt. A society transformed by stepping should not fight exactly as old societies did. Yet the narrative sometimes withholds the dramatic force implied by its own framing without replacing it with an equally powerful central arc.

Readers who accept the novel as a chronicle of a changing civilization are likely to enjoy its digressions. Those who need every subplot to tighten the same narrative screw may find the experience frustrating. The final movement delivers consequence and scale, but it does not retroactively turn every strand into a conventional thriller. This is a book whose pleasures are cumulative: an institutional absurdity here, an unsettling implication there, and gradually a clearer picture of humanity exporting itself into infinity.

Who should read The Long War?

This sequel is best for readers who found the first book's premise more exciting than its plot. It expands exactly the elements that made the Long Earth distinctive: practical consequences, strange ecologies, new communities, and the philosophical difficulty of abundance. Anyone drawn to science fiction about governance, migration, colonial behavior, or nonhuman intelligence will find substantial material to consider.

It is not a good entry point. The setting can be explained in a sentence, but Joshua and Lobsang's history, the meaning of natural stepping, and the social shock of Step Day carry weight from the first volume. Starting here would turn carefully developed consequences into a list of unusual facts. Read The Long Earth first, then approach this as the second movement of a continuing sequence rather than a self-contained adventure.

Pratchett readers should also know what kind of book this is. There is wit, institutional satire, and compassion for the overlooked, but the voice is cooler and more panoramic than Discworld. Baxter readers may be more immediately at home with the large-scale extrapolation, though the moral comedy continually nudges the systems away from abstraction.

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Strengths, cautions, and useful alternatives

The strongest reason to read The Long War is its refusal to waste the original premise. Infinite parallel Earths are not just scenery for another journey. They destabilize sovereignty, transform migration, and expose the persistence of human hierarchy even after geographic scarcity has been radically reduced. The troll storyline adds an ecological and ethical dimension that prevents the political thought experiment from becoming bloodless.

The principal caution is shape. The book is expansive where many readers will want it to be decisive. Its multiple threads create range, but they also thin the emotional impact. The characters are often most memorable as carriers of attitudes toward the Long Earth, and the narrative's measured pace can make a supposed crisis feel remote. These are not accidental flaws so much as consequences of the authors' chosen scale, but they remain real costs.

If the appeal is the central premise, The Long Earth is the essential alternative and prerequisite: it offers more discovery and a clearer journey structure. Readers who want a more concentrated political confrontation in speculative fiction might turn to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, where competing societies are explored through a more intimate central consciousness. Those interested in the ethics of contact with an intelligence humans struggle to understand may prefer Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which gives its nonhuman perspective more sustained narrative space. For a comic treatment of institutions and human folly with a stronger authorial snap, Pratchett's Discworld novels remain the better destination.

Final verdict

The Long War is an intelligent, sometimes unwieldy sequel that understands expansion as a moral test rather than a fantasy of limitless escape. Its best passages show how quickly old habits of government, prejudice, and exploitation can colonize new worlds. Its least effective passages reveal the difficulty of turning a civilization-scale thought experiment into a consistently urgent novel.

That tension makes the book easy to admire and harder to love without reservation. The world grows richer, the questions become sharper, and the partnership between Pratchett's humane satire and Baxter's speculative reach remains fruitful. At the same time, the diffuse ensemble and exploratory pacing keep several ideas from landing with their full dramatic weight.

Readers already invested in the Long Earth should continue. The sequel broadens the series in meaningful ways and establishes that stepping has social consequences no pioneering adventure could contain. Readers seeking a stand-alone war story should look elsewhere. This is a novel about the pressures before violence, the negotiations that may avert it, and the responsibility that comes with finding there is always another world to enter.