Moon-Watcher’s Cousins: The Human Radiation Across the Long Earth by Professor Wotan Ulm

Thanks to Starwatch.space

Title: Moon Watcher’s Cousins: The Human Radiation Across the Long Earth

Author: Professor Wotan Ulm, Oxford University 

Publisher: not known but perhaps Oxford University Press 

Source book: The Long War by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter

Professor Wotan Ulm has written a bestselling, if controversial, book (do you think that Terry Pratchett was a Douglas Adams fan? It certainly sounds like it). 

I didn’t immediately get what Moon Watcher’s Cousins might be about. Or indeed who Moon Watcher might be…. until I remembered (OK - googled it) that Moon Watcher is from 2001: A Space Odyssey. He’s a man-ape who watches the moon and learns how to use tools. If you know that, you will perhaps recognise that the Cousins are the equivalent to Moon Watcher on the different worlds of the Long Earth. I think it’s a slightly dodgy title for a book because I totally didn’t get the allusion. It’s a very long time since I read 2001 which was never my favourite Arthur C Clarke, and I have never yet managed to sit through the film which I thought dreadfully dull. 

However, Professor Ulm gives an extensive interview to the BBC about the “kobolds” found in the exploration of the Long Earth, and there is quite a chunk of it quoted in chapter 44 of the source book.

Also mentioned is an unnamed book ‘written’ by Thomas Kyangu about Combers* (travellers from world to world who do not attempt to mould the worlds, but live in them as they are) and cities; a new theory of civilisation. He holds his book in his head and gives ‘readings’ in the different worlds of the Long Earth.

*that’s Combers as in beachcombers. Do not attempt to pronounce this word com-bers.

Thanks to Firstcry.com