Planesrunner

Planesrunner
by Ian McDonald
Prometheus Books, 2011. 263 pgs. Young Adult.

Everett Singh sees his scientist father kidnapped, but when he looks to the police for help they blow him off and tamper with pictures of the crime to make it seem like he is imagining things. At the same time an unusual app appears on his computer from his father--the Infundibulum, nothing less than the key to the multiverse. Everyone wants what they think Everett has, and he leads them along until he gets close enough to a Heisenberg gate to bolt through into an alternate London (one of the Ten Known Worlds), where the economy is based on coal-fired electricity instead of petroleum and where airships are the predominant form of commercial and industrial transport. While Everett looks frantically for his father, he is taken in by the crew of the airship Everness, and when Charlotte Villiers and her henchpeople come through the gate after Everett, his new mates pitch in to help. Planesrunner is the first in a projected series of adventures in the multiverse as Everett seeks his beloved father among billions (to many powers) of alternate realities. Ian McDonald, award-winning author of mainstream sci-fi creates here a breakneck, brain-boosting adventure one can only hope will have a sequel very very soon.

LW