Just finished The Long Earth series by Sir Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter. I'm a huge Pratchett fan and these were my first Baxter novels. It pains me to say it, but it was kind of awful..
The whole series can be summed up by "amazing premises that go entirely to waste". The pacing and plot of the books are just terrible, to be frank - each book feels like 9/10 exposition 1/10 plot & character development.
So many fascinating plot points are just abandoned without ever being revisited.
Where did the rectangle buildings with the ray guns come from?
What became of the Beagles after humanities intervention?
Who built the martian beanstalk, and what became of them?
What happened to the fragment of Lobsong/Abraham that was left in the satellite on the Silver Beetle world?
Who sent "The Invitation", and why?
And then even more plot points are kept going, but it feels clear that Baxter really had no idea what to do with them.
The Next show up (out of nowhere) and then proceed to just spend all their time naval gazing until the Deus Ex Machina that is "The Thinker"
Valhalla's quiet revolution was the subject of the whole second book - but then at the point of the third book, basically nothing has changed.
The Traversers went from being an existential threat to the whole long Earth to just being a cool tourist destination, seemingly overnight.
Lobsang's avatar which he sent to 1st person singular was supposed to become absorbed into it, but it turns out he was just having a beach vacation the whole time.
Ultimately I wound up severely dissapointed given how excited I was in the first half of the first book. It's an amazing premise and has so much potential. But ultimately it feels squandered.
I had to really force myself to finish the final book, without much enjoyment
I stopped at the fourth book I think, because it was just getting worse and I didn't want to have my entire experience with the series soured. I'm glad I did too.