Transmentation Transience is a creative project composed by a group of authors writing together under the name Darkly Lem. They describe themselves as "five authors in an impeccably-tailored trenchcoat, namely Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull, and M. Darusha Wehm." I came into contact with this book due to being a fan of Turnbull, so it was interesting to see what a collaborative piece would turn out to be. I honestly didn't know what to expect. I have read books where two authors are writing under one name, but cannot recall reading a book where 5 authors were. Somehow, in ways I don't fully understand, they made it work.
TT is a book about many worlds. Central to the stories are people who hop from one universe to another, finding themselves in a new body, retaining their own mind and personality, but still being changed by who they end up inhabiting. It is not fully clear how this works or what exactly it entails. This is probably a show don't tell choice, but I hope more explanation comes in future books. There are various groups existing in various universes, many of which have conflicts with one another. Thankfully, the authors give us a character list in the very beginning telling us which locality various characters are located in. As someone with a horrendous memory, I often have to take notes when reading books with tons of characters, especially when those characters are sometimes turning into other characters in another universes. I was very grateful to see this list when I opened the book.
The writing in TT is cohesive. I am not sure if each author wrote a different section containing each story about characters existing in each locality. There are definite distinctions between each section that would benefit from such an approach. But, stylistically it still fits together for the most part. I would say the last quarter of the book feels a bit disjointed. That is also because there are a couple twists that occur that are not well explained.
I'm being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers. Overall, despite all of these different universes, characters, and names, I found the book fairly easy to follow. There are some things that are just personal taste that weren't my favorite. I would say this book is what some call science fantasy more than science fiction. The way some of the worlds and the characters and beings within them are designed doesn't feel quite right to me. There are also a couple of events that occur in the last quarter that we're not introduced as fluidly as they could be. I ended up going back and rereading certain sections thinking I missed something. I had not. The characters themselves though all felt quite real to me. I especially enjoyed sections with long conversations. It's interesting that a story with so much extravagant inter-universal travel and wild action scenes enthralled me most when it was just two people discussing their experiences.
The book is definitely designed to be part of a larger series- listed as the first book in "The Formation Saga." At over 400 pages, (in my ARC at least,) the conclusion leaves you with prompts for the story to continue, rather than a bunch of concrete resolutions. This was such an interesting approach to writing that I hope the series is given the green light to continue by the publisher and not abandoned like some of these projects are. I enjoyed a glimpse into these universes and was left curious about what comes next for these characters. I do hope that when a new book is written, they will offer a decent recap of things that happened in this one for other memory-deficient people like myself.
This was also posted to my goodreads and storygraph.
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