Tim Pratt’s last trilogy from Angry Robot, the Axiom (
The Wrong Stars,
The Dreaming Stars, and
The Forbidden Stars), was precisely the kind of space opera romp guaranteed to delight me. Fast paced, and with a rag-tag crew of heroes and a selection of batshit weird dangers, it drove an appealing course through a galaxy not so very far away.
With
Doors of Sleep, Pratt opens a new series, and although it’s far from space opera, its rollicking pace and fiercely inventive worldbuilding makes it every bit as appealing.
Zaxony Dyad Euphony Delatree is very far from home. Every time he falls asleep, he wakes up in another universe, and has done so for approximately the last three years. He’s fallen into over a thousand worlds, and then fallen out of them just as quickly. Along the way, he’s had a handful of companions – for he can take people with him, if he falls asleep touching them – but all of them have left him, or been left behind. One of them, a man known as the Lector, eventually tried to vivisect him to uncover the secrets of his ability to travel. The worlds Zax passes through are varied in their technology and inhabitants, but frequently dangerous.