Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Video
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$14.05$14.05
FREE delivery: Tuesday, Jan 30 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Massena's
Buy used: $12.43
Other Sellers on Amazon
& FREE Shipping
98% positive over last 12 months
& FREE Shipping
91% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the authors
OK
The Long War (Long Earth, 2) Hardcover – June 18, 2013
Purchase options and add-ons
The Long War by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter follows the adventures and travails of heroes Joshua Valiente and Lobsang in an exciting continuation of the extraordinary science fiction journey begun in their New York Times bestseller The Long Earth.
A generation after the events of The Long Earth, humankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by “stepping.” A new “America”—Valhalla—is emerging more than a million steps from Datum—our Earth. Thanks to a bountiful environment, the Valhallan society mirrors the core values and behaviors of colonial America. And Valhalla is growing restless under the controlling long arm of the Datum government.
Soon Joshua, now a married man, is summoned by Lobsang to deal with a building crisis that threatens to plunge the Long Earth into a war unlike any humankind has waged before.
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateJune 18, 2013
- Dimensions6 x 1.33 x 9 inches
- ISBN-10006206777X
- ISBN-13978-0062067777
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
“In this thought-provoking collaboration, Pratchett (the Discworld series) and Baxter (Stone Spring) create an infinity of worlds to explore… fascinating premise.” — Publishers Weekly
From the Back Cover
War has come to the Long Earth....
Humankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by stepping, which Joshua and Lobsang explored a mere decade ago. Now "civilization" flourishes, and fleets of airships link the multiple Earths through exploration, trade, and culture.
Humankind is shaping the Long Earth, but in turn the Long Earth is shaping humankind. A new America that has christened itself "Valhalla" has emerged more than a million steps from the original Datum Earth. And like the American revolutionaries of old, the Valhallans resent being controlled from afar by the Datum government.
In the intervening years, the song of the trolls—graceful, hive-mind humanoids—has suffused the Long Earth. But in the face of humankind's inexorable advance, they are beginning to fall silent . . . and gradually disappear.
Joshua, now married and a father, is summoned by Lobsang. It seems that he alone can confront the perfect storm of crises that threatens to plunge all of the Long Earth into war.
A war unlike any that has been waged before...
About the Author
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) is the acclaimed author of the globally revered Discworld series, the first of which, The Color of Magic, was published in 1983. In all, he was the author of more than fifty bestselling books that have sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he was the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal for his young adult novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. He was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature in 2009, although he always wryly maintained that his greatest services to literature was to avoid writing any.
Stephen Baxter is an acclaimed, multiple-award-winning author whose many books include the Xeelee Sequence series, the Time Odyssey trilogy (written with Arthur C. Clarke), and The Time Ships, a sequel to H. G. Wells's classic The Time Machine. He lives in England.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper; First American Edition (June 18, 2013)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 006206777X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062067777
- Item Weight : 1.42 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.33 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,600,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,631 in Exploration Science Fiction
- #20,167 in Fantasy Action & Adventure
- #25,551 in Science Fiction Adventures
- Customer Reviews:
Important information
To report an issue with this product or seller, click here.
About the authors

Terry Pratchett sold his first story when he was fifteen, which earned him enough money to buy a second-hand typewriter. His first novel, a humorous fantasy entitled The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 from the publisher Colin Smythe. Terry worked for many years as a journalist and press officer, writing in his spare time and publishing a number of novels, including his first Discworld novel, The Color of Magic, in 1983. In 1987 he turned to writing full time, and has not looked back since. To date there are a total of 36 books in the Discworld series, of which four (so far) are written for children. The first of these children's books, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, won the Carnegie Medal. A non-Discworld book, Good Omens, his 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman, has been a longtime bestseller, and was reissued in hardcover by William Morrow in early 2006 (it is also available as a mass market paperback (Harper Torch, 2006) and trade paperback (Harper Paperbacks, 2006). Terry's latest book, Nation, a non-Discworld standalone YA novel was published in October of 2008 and was an instant New York Times and London Times bestseller. Regarded as one of the most significant contemporary English-language satirists, Pratchett has won numerous literary awards, was named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature” in 1998, and has received four honorary doctorates from the Universities of Warwick, Portsmouth, Bath, and Bristol. His acclaimed novels have sold more than 55 million copies (give or take a few million) and have been translated into 36 languages. Terry Pratchett lived in England with his family, and spent too much time at his word processor. Some of Terry's accolades include: The Carnegie Medal, Locus Awards, the Mythopoetic Award, ALA Notable Books for Children, ALA Best Books for Young Adults, Book Sense 76 Pick, Prometheus Award and the British Fantasy Award.

Stephen Baxter is the pre-eminent SF writer of his generation. Published around the world he has also won major awards in the UK, US, Germany, and Japan. Born in 1957 he has degrees from Cambridge and Southampton. He lives in Northumberland with his wife.
Here are the Destiny's Children novels in series order:
Coalescent
Exultant
Transcendent
Resplendent
Time's Tapestry novels in series order:
Emperor
Conqueror
Navigator Weaver
Flood novels:
Flood
Ark
Time Odyssey series (with Arthur C Clarke):
Time's Eye
Sunstorm
Firstborn
Manifold series:
Time
Space
Origin
Phase Space
Mammoth series:
Mammoth (aka Silverhair)
Long Tusk
Ice Bones
Behemoth
NASA trilogy:
Voyage
Titan
Moonseed
Xeelee sequence:
Raft
Timelike Infinity
Flux
Ring
Vacuum Diagrams (linked short stories)
The Xeelee Omnibus (Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring)
The Web series for Young Adults:
Gulliverzone
Webcrash
Coming in 2010:
Stone Spring - book one of the Northland series
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Having grown accustomed to Terry Pratchett's Disc World with it's laugh a minute headlong flight in to anarchy and laughter, I am still adjusting to the Baxter/Pratchett partnership. I find the "Long Earth Series" rather slow for my taste, but the books are well written and do hold your interest for "the long haul".
The Long War is the second Novel in the Series and I am not sure that it can stand alone. It may just be that I already read the first Novel, but many of the Characters and events refer back to "The Long Earth", so it is well worth reading the first Novel First.
Both Books are basically "Boy's Own" Adventure Stories or "Road Stories". Both Books are built around the experiences of a small group of adventurers and in this book new characters have been gathered deliberately to expand the viewpoints. In some cases I am not able to see what some specific characters brought to the longer story, but perhaps their input will become more obvious in the next Book.
Although I really enjoyed the read, I was uncomfortable from the beginning with the idea that Sally could drag Joshua away from his small community and his family and send him off "to save the world" again. I was uncomfortable with the author's intent to create marital disharmony where there need not be any. I was pleased that Joshua's wife stood her ground and participated to some extent, but this is a story, for heavens sake! with the involvement of an omniscient being, no-one was having to pay for the voyage! I can not see why the whole family could not have gone along on the adventure and added their own small inputs (or left hooks).
It was good to see some Newcomers getting involved and I was pleased that in fact there never was a War. Just political posturing which can so easily lead to war, but in this case did not.
In the "about the Book" at the beginning, the publisher/authors mentions "And it is to Joshua that the long earth now turns for help..." I did not find the bit where anyone but Sally asked him to help, nor was I able to see how Joshua's involvement was so important, although Sally was clearly a catalyst for several positive outcomes. I could not see why the trolls chose to move to the particular "Earth" they chose, nor even how Joshua's involvement affected their decision to return to the "other Earths". Certainly the earth they chose to retire to affected Joshua's long term future, but that such gentle creatures should even consider cohabitating with a race that turned out to be so vicious and self serving was not clearly explained.
In short, it was a good story, leading on from the earlier book and clearly there will be a follow up from this one, but I felt it was just a wee bit "lost" and "rambling". There were lots of sub stories and sub plots and characters from the earlier story being re-introduced. There were happy endings and sad endings, often depending on your view. There was sex and Rock n Roll, but not in any meaningful way.
And there were certainly no unexpected chortles or sniggers leading members of the public to wonder what on earth it is, that you are reading on the bus!
The Long War expands the cast of The Long Earth, bringing back nearly all the supporting characters and introducing a few new ones. Like its predecessor, The Long War doesn't really do anything with most of them. There are some subplots that have been carried over from TLE, for example the Nelson Azikiwe plot, that persist in not really having anything happen in them. Other, new subplots (like the China mission) suffer from the same malady.
The glacial pace of these subplots, and, by extension, the overarching plot of the series, would be more understandable and excusable if the books were longer, or were developing a more nuanced arrangement of elements. However, with the characters mostly being explicitly variations on the same basic worthy archetypes (socially enlightened loner/pioneer, socially enlightened maverick captain, socially enlightened female loner/pioneer, socially enlightened AI, etc.) there's not much opportunity for any real conflict between them. The "conflict" that does develop is mainly between individual humans and some circumstance of whatever alternate Earth or group thereof those humans find themselves; there's always a feeling of arbitrariness about the way these encounters play out. Later on in the story, it was hard for me to shake the feeling that certain events were the authors' way of writing themselves back out of a corner. There's some foreshadowing of the potential future importance of some of the characters, but given the way the foreshadowing in the first book was subverted here, I wouldn't be surprised if those characters spent Book Three asleep. This would be more forgivable if TLE and TLW weren't all setup.
Another thing I want to touch on quickly is that although I know that Terry Pratchett has a good ear for comic dialogue on his own (I have read none of Stephen Baxter's solo work, so I can't comment on that), as a pair, these authors cannot write convincing character dialogue for this sort of story. Also, the dialogue of the main characters--Joshua, Monica, Helen, and Sally--is not credible as the speech of human beings, much less so of Americans, and of Wisconsinites in no way whatsoever.
The core conceit of the Long Earth series (humans develop the ability to travel through a theoretically-infinite range of parallel Earths with alternate histories on a geologic/cosmic time scale, and therefore with more-or-less widely divergent geographies and ecosystems) is still fun, though, even two books in. If you get past the characters and the plot, there are a lot of nifty thought experiments scattered throughout.
Almost the entire cast of the last book returns along with some new characters who add more depth to an already multilayered story. The hodgepodge comes off beautifully overall, although we don't get much as much insight in Joshua and Sally as I would have liked. But TLW offers a much better picture of what it might mean to politics, faith, and our individual sense of importance and security to suddenly discover that neither our universe, nor or place in it as sapient beings, is unique. While several questions from TLE are resolved, the final act throws a curveball that nicely sets the stage for another installment.
I highly recommend this book. It's a wonderfully thoughful and witty take on the parallel worlds trope with enough science to feel grounded, but not so much that the characters stop being the most compelling part of the story.
Top reviews from other countries
This book is like previous one, nothing much happens, people just doing forgettable stuff. So forgettable I literally lost what happened after a week or two.
There were the dog people who could provide an adversary, but didn't. Nothing happens people, the first book was carried by the setting, but this one seems to have nada.
I may be a die-hard fan but I wouldn't say something was good if it wasn't; and this book was great.
The whole Long Earth premise is very clever and is developed ever so well over this second book. I loved the characters, even though Lobsang does mirror disc-world's Lu-Tze - so what? There were interactions with him that made me burst out laughing.
Totally glad I purchased this and will be getting the next installment, The Long Mars.



![The Long Earth 1st (first) Edition by Pratchett, Terry, Baxter, Stephen [2012]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51P+WvSRNlL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)



