March to Other Worlds Day 30: Outland by Dennis E. Taylor
Day 30 Outland by Dennis E. Taylor
Roughly 30 years ago, I read a (fondly remembered) book called The Wild Side by Steven Gould about a group of students who discover a portal to a parallel universe. Since then it seems like we come across parallel universes everywhere. The Heisenberg Corollary was spotlighted earlier in this year’s March to Other Worlds. Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber from last year’s March might be considered the ultimate parallel worlds series. Robert A. Heinlein has The Number of the Beast. King and Straub wrote The Talisman. And then there’s Peter Cawdron’s Maelstrom (March to Other Worlds 2020), Star Trek’s Mirror, Mirror, the whole Sliders series, and I really could go on and on.
Enter Outland by Dennis E. Taylor. In many ways it starts out like a Robert A. Heinlein novel. A group of college students has discovered a way to open a portal into another universe and immediately start thinking about how they can make money off of it. They realize that they will lose control of their invention if the government, a major corporation, or even their university learns of its existence, so they begin seeking other ways to make money. One of the worlds is suffering from a horrendous green-house-inspired catastrophe, but another appears to be a North America without humans. They adopt the most commonly used strategy among these sorts of books and go panning for gold.
Had that been all that Taylor had in mind, this would have been an alright book. College students do not put large amounts of gold up for sale without attracting attention and that created lots of good tension in the story. Fortunately, Taylor has a much better plot in mind. While these college students are exploring their new world, the super volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park is preparing to blow. When it does, it immediately changes the whole situation and the college students have to focus on how they are going to survive an extinction level event on our planet and how many people they can save. This plot twist turns an enjoyable book into an intensely exciting one. I can’t wait to see where it goes next.
