Transmentation | Transience by Darkly Lem: Review by Alexandra Pierce

Transmentation | Transience, Darkly Lem (Blackstone 979-8-21218-599-8, $28.99, 400pp, hc) March 2025. Cover by Kathryn English.

I came to this novel with no knowledge of what I was going into. I had heard that Darkly Lem was a collaboration between five authors – Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turn­bull, and M. Darusha Wehm – but I hadn’t read any of their individual work. On top of that, I had no idea what the Many Worlds and the Simulacrum were, only later discovering that stories have been published on the Many Worlds site since 2021 – but by then I had already thrown myself into this tangled, explosive, sly, intricate, and occasionally infuriating saga.

The novel opens with ‘‘Contextual Notes and Declarations’’ – one of those prefatory pieces that means little when you first read it, and then becomes explosive when you come back to it. The most useful thing it explains for the first-time read­er is that words used by different societies all mean the same thing: hide, coat, front – they all mean ‘‘proxy.’’ Because the heart of Transmentation | Transience is the ability of some people to travel between universes – yes, it’s another take on the multiverse – but don’t go, this one is different! No one is moving bodies between universes. Instead, it’s their minds (and souls?) which travel; a person inhabits a ‘‘proxy’’ in the new universe, does what needs doing there, before travelling either back to their original body or on to another universe.

There are several strands that get tangled across the novel. There’s Malculm, an intelligence operative for Burel Hird, whose mission goes wrong in the first few pages and who suffers the repercussions personally and professionally. There’s the machinations of the Burel Hird First Council, particularly centring on Duncan, a vice-councillor, who has power and is utterly devoted to the People, while Trystèsté and Priema, like­wise vice-councillors, are much more personally ambitious. Maddalena and Reg, of the fractious Firmāre society, are peripherally involved in a plot to assassinate a member of the Burel Hird council. Mëryl and Shann come from different societies – Withered Stem and Harraka – but have come to know one another on a backwater planet over many years. Now, Shann is trying to convince Mëryl to betray her society. And finally, there’s Beinir and Shara, roamers from Of Tala: mercenaries who move from proxy to proxy much more frequently than people from other societies. One of the utter joys in this novel is seeing how the actions of one character impact on another in a different universe, and watching the slow untangling of the various threads so that by the end, they make a coherent picture (almost; it is the first in a trilogy after all). Going in, I wasn’t sure I could trust that the story would hold together. There are some parts that I still don’t understand, but I have faith that there is a plan.

Burel Hird is the key faction – theirs are the ‘‘nine thousand worlds’’ of the subtitle: They firmly believe that all universes need to be brought within their sphere in order to prosper. It’s a ter­rifying credit to Darkly Lem that they make this imperial, expansionist attitude almost make sense – the people who are advocating for it genuinely believe in their mission, that they are bringing safety and prosperity to those brought into the fold: One character firmly states that ‘‘people outside the People is cruelty.’’ It’s a fascinating and grim example of how authoritarian regimes can work. (There are also a lot of committees, like the Committee for Safe and Congruous Egress – yes, they help you walk through doors.)

It’s not exactly a joy, because of the implications, but the other key aspect of the novel is the explora­tion of how the universe-travel works and what it means. Some people, regarded as hopelessly backwards by everyone else, refuse to believe that universe-hopping is real, choosing instead to see belief in it as a mental illness. One of the few characters to think about the travel beyond the mechanical aspects only briefly wonders about the meaning of ‘‘self’’ when one is constantly chang­ing bodies – a question that has been examined before in science fiction, to be sure, but still a vital one, and open to many analogies. Furthermore, everyone accepts that their proxies have a life when they – their minds – are elsewhere; food is consumed, work is even done. It’s gradually revealed that when someone inhabits a proxy, the incomer has to deal with the proxy’s existing knowledge, language, and behaviour patterns. Which begs many questions around what, or who, proxies actually are; I hold out hope that this will be examined in the rest of the trilogy.

Tangled, explosive, sly, intricate, infuriating: and magnificent. This is a shared world to keep an eye on, and a trilogy that is sure to challenge and delight.

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This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.

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