The Long Mars, published in 2014 by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, is the third installment in the collaborative science fiction series known as The Long Earth. Set after a cataclysmic eruption of Yellowstone in 2040, the novel explores the vast expanse of parallel worlds accessible by “stepping” technology, with a particular focus on the newly discovered chain of alternate Mars planets, collectively called the Long Mars. As with its predecessors, the novel blends speculative technology with philosophical musings and human resilience in the face of monumental change.
Plot Summary
In the year 2045, five years after the Yellowstone supervolcano brought ruin to Datum Earth, Joshua Valienté walks the empty worlds of the High Meggers, a million steps from home, seeking solace in solitude. But even here, under the eternal starlight of untouched skies, memories chase him – of his estranged wife Helen, their son Dan, and his unpredictable companion Sally Linsay. The devastation of Yellowstone has not only scarred the earth but fractured lives, forcing millions to step into parallel worlds in search of refuge.
Joshua, compelled by duty and haunted by compassion, returns to the ash-choked footprint of Bozeman West 1 to aid survivors. Alongside Sally, he rescues a family trapped under pumice and despair, relying on the mysterious “soft places” – fragile seams in reality only a few can navigate. Their mission, though harrowing, is a small gesture against the backdrop of a fractured nation.
Far above the western plains, Maggie Kauffman captains the USS Benjamin Franklin, a twain airship that glides across the parallel Americas delivering relief and diplomacy. In Wichita West 1, a city now swollen with refugees, she meets Captain Chen of the Chinese Navy. His arrival cloaks deeper intentions, as nations quietly vie for control in this newly dispersed world. Maggie holds fast to her duty, determined to carry out the democratic rituals of a struggling republic – even if it means navigating foreign egos and smuggling ballot boxes.
Lobsang, the enigmatic figure born from a Tibetan soul and artificial intelligence, watches from his place between life and something more distant. Through the lens of the Bardo Thodol, he contemplates rebirth and the karmic resonance of a broken Earth. Though he claims detachment, he yearns for his friends – Joshua, Sally, and even Maggie – and the brief, bright moments when human choices defied despair.
Sally Linsay, still fiercely independent and elusive, returns to a settlement in the far West to deliver poetic justice to a troll-hunting brute. Her bond with the creatures of the Long Earth – especially the trolls, gentle humanoids native to the untouched worlds – runs deeper than kinship. She guards them as fiercely as she avoids civilization. But even she cannot ignore the message awaiting her in a dusty envelope: a summons from her father, Willis Linsay, the mind behind the Stepper box and the man who upended reality.
Sally answers the call, stepping into the fortified sprawl of GapSpace, a launch facility one step from the Gap – a rupture in the chain of worlds, an infinite silence in space. Here, rockets are not fired into the sky but launched sideways into the cosmos. Willis, gaunt and intense, speaks of a greater mission. Beyond Earth, beyond the familiar skein of parallel worlds, lies a chain of Marses – the Long Mars – and he intends to explore it.
With him is Al Raup, a bombastic engineer who shares none of Willis’s vision but all of his ambition. Sally, ever skeptical, demands better company for such a voyage. She finds it in Frank Wood, a former NASA astronaut left obsolete by the Stepper age, now eager to embrace a dream thought forever lost. Together, they launch from the Brick Moon, a station suspended in the Gap, and begin their journey to Mars – not the cold desert known from telescopes, but a living world, a Mars of water, vegetation, and possibilities.
Their craft cuts across the void with the power of nuclear rockets and the logic-defying elegance of stepwise propulsion. Upon landing, they find not only a habitable landscape but signs of life – delicate, strange, and undeniable. As they traverse this unfamiliar Mars, they discover that the planet, like Earth, stretches sideways into countless versions. And among these Martian echoes, they detect intelligence – a native sapience that challenges every certainty.
Back on Earth, change spreads like wildfire. President Cowley, delivering a speech in the stepwise capital of Madison West 5, declares a massive relocation. With the Datum choking in volcanic ash and famine looming, millions are to be resettled across the Low Earths. The Great Relocation begins, a biblical exodus powered by steppers, airships, and human tenacity. Fields are cleared, homes built, and new lives begun, world after world.
Amid this movement, Roberta Golding, a brilliant young scientist, ascends rapidly through government and research circles. Born of the frontier, she carries an intuition the old world lacks. Her role in advising policy, guiding relocation, and managing crises becomes central to shaping humanity’s future across the multiverse.
In the English countryside, Nelson Azikiwe ministers to the spiritually adrift. Eileen Connolly, once a quiet believer, now questions the soul’s place in a reality where Christ never walked the stepwise Earths. The Vatican’s claim over the Long Earth stirs protest and confusion. A failed assassination attempt on the Pope echoes this unease, while David Blessed, Nelson’s mentor, urges him to accompany Eileen into the new worlds, to bless their steps and assure them God is not bound to a single planet.
As the manned Mars mission unfolds, Sally confronts her father’s ambitions. Willis reveals his belief that intelligent life and the Long phenomenon are intertwined – that sapient beings may shape or be drawn to these stepwise realities. The Marses, he argues, confirm his theory. But his pursuit borders on obsession, and Sally sees in him the same heedless curiosity that once ripped the veil between worlds.
Joshua, meanwhile, wanders deeper into the West, retreating from family and civilization. His sabbatical, meant to clear his mind, leaves him adrift. It is in the silence of a million-step world that he is jolted by a vision – a Martian, perhaps – and realizes the scope of what lies ahead. The universe, he understands, is not just wide and wild, but reactive. It shifts in response to the presence of minds that can question it.
Above it all, Lobsang drifts, tethered to memory and meaning. He watches the Earths, the Marses, the fragile threads that bind people together across the void. Though he is no longer present in form, his soul clings to the hope that his friends, in their scattered journeys, will find what he never could – a way to live fully in the infinite.
And so they move – Joshua through worlds, Sally toward Mars, humanity across the Long Earth – not as conquerors, but as seekers in an endless chain of possibilities, each step a choice, each world a mirror.
Main Characters
Joshua Valienté: A seasoned explorer of the Long Earth, Joshua is a thoughtful, duty-driven man grappling with personal isolation and the responsibility of aiding a devastated Earth. His internal conflicts and enduring compassion make him a vital link between the known world and the frontier.
Sally Linsay: Fierce, independent, and brilliant, Sally is both the daughter of Willis Linsay, the Stepper’s inventor, and a veteran of the Long Earth. Her disdain for authority and passion for the natural order drive her to advocate for the preservation of non-human species in the alternate worlds. Her journey into the Long Mars represents both a familial and scientific reckoning.
Willis Linsay: The enigmatic and driven creator of the original Stepper box. He embodies both the visionary and the reckless inventor archetype, pushing the boundaries of known science while leaving emotional chaos in his wake, particularly in his strained relationship with Sally.
Lobsang: A complex entity believed to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman in an AI form. Lobsang serves as a philosophical observer and covert guide, wrestling with existential questions and remaining a spectral influence throughout the narrative.
Maggie Kauffman: A U.S. Navy captain tasked with managing relief efforts and political diplomacy post-Yellowstone. Her arc reflects the pressures of leadership and the ethical balancing act between national interests and global responsibility.
Roberta Golding: A gifted young prodigy with a rapidly ascending political and scientific career, Roberta plays a subtle but growing role in shaping the future policies of stepwise migration and resource management.
Theme
Exploration and Frontierism: Central to the narrative is the eternal human drive to explore the unknown. From the ashes of Yellowstone to the alien vistas of Mars, the novel evokes a space-age revival of manifest destiny, yet complicates it with moral and ecological questions.
Survival and Resilience: In the wake of environmental catastrophe, the characters embody varying responses to survival. The repopulation of stepwise Earths, adaptation to new climates, and the emotional toll of loss all highlight humanity’s enduring resilience.
Technology and Ethics: The Stepper box and its evolution challenge the ethics of unregulated advancement. The novel delves into issues of intellectual ownership, unintended consequences, and the thin line between salvation and exploitation.
Philosophy and Identity: Through figures like Lobsang and debates around the theological status of parallel worlds, the novel interrogates consciousness, reincarnation, and what it means to be human in an infinite multiverse.
Ecology and Preservation: With Sally’s defense of the trolls and other native species, the book underscores the ecological impact of colonization. The untouched worlds of the Long Earth serve as a mirror to our treatment of nature on Datum Earth.
Writing Style and Tone
Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter blend their distinct voices into a narrative that is both intellectually provocative and darkly whimsical. Pratchett’s hallmark wit and philosophical underpinnings weave subtly with Baxter’s rigorous scientific grounding and expansive world-building. The language is accessible yet layered, often veering into lyrical territory when describing alien landscapes or moments of introspection.
The tone of The Long Mars oscillates between awe and caution, reverence and satire. While the scope is grand – literally cosmic – the narrative remains anchored in deeply personal moments and interpersonal conflicts. This duality infuses the work with a dynamic rhythm, balancing spectacle with sincerity. The mood often shifts from urgent (in disaster relief sequences) to contemplative (in discussions of theology and existence), creating a multifaceted literary experience.
Quotes
The Long Mars – Terry Pratchett (2014) Quotes
“So many worlds, so many wonders.”
“You can never have too much backup.”
“I can tell you what I feel. That God is not out there somewhere. God is in us, in our everyday lives. In the act of understanding. God is the sacredness of comprehension – no, of the act of comprehension.”
“Nelson had to smile. ‘Theology? David, this is the Church of England. We don’t do theology.”
“Right. Mars has about the same day as Earth, so a twenty-four-hour orbit does the trick here too. Then you just drop a cable down through the atmosphere—’ ‘The engineering details of that,’ Frank said dryly, ‘are left as an exercise for the reader.”
“Now we have travelled a hundred million steps from the Datum, we are finding life systems entirely unlike our own - and yet we still find war. Must it always be so?”
“this was”
“The Long Earth was my Narnia. You know Narnia?" "That's the one with the hobbits, right?”
“We meant well.” My God, I wonder how many sins have been justified by that line?”
“There was a novel called Red Mars—”
“was somewhat upsetting to a decent Catholic girl, for there was no room for that in the orthodox theology. However, she’d always concentrated on the old maxim that the best course was to do the good that was in front of her, and to put such doubts aside.”
“God is not out there somewhere. God is in us, in our everyday lives. In the act of understanding. God is the sacredness of comprehension – no, of the act of comprehension.’ ‘You”
“Your gods are trivial constructs. Easy to dismiss. Animistic fantasies or mammalian wish complexes. You are lost children longing for papa, and casting his image into the sky.’ ‘Very”
“you clever apes, smart enough to destroy everything around you, never smart enough to understand what it is you are losing in the process . . .”
“As if we see these worlds, the whole of the Long Earth all at once, through the eyes of a god.’ Only”
“Your gods are trivial constructs. Easy to dismiss. Animistic fantasies or mammalian wish complexes. You are lost children longing for papa, and casting his image into the sky.”
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