Our Take

M.R. Carey has a track record of taking familiar genre premises and finding the idea inside them nobody else thought of — he did it with zombie fiction in The Girl With All the Gifts, and he does it again here with the multiverse story. The twist at the heart of Infinity Gate — that a "million worlds" are really just one Earth, endlessly repeated — reframes the entire premise of interdimensional war as something closer to a civil war with reality itself as the battlefield. What keeps the book grounded despite its massive scope is Hadiz Tambuwal, whose motivation never strays from something painfully human: she just wants to save her planet. That personal stake anchors a plot that could otherwise spin out into pure high-concept spectacle. As the first entry in the Pandominion series, this is clearly setting up a much larger conflict, and Carey uses the full 499 pages to build out the rules and stakes of his multiverse carefully rather than rushing the reveal. Readers who want their science fiction big in scope but still emotionally specific will find a lot to like here — and a series clearly built to expand from this foundation.