Ian McDonald
Be My Enemy

A great wealth of content and ideas compose the science fiction imagination of "Everness" by Ian McDonald, a true series inaugurated with "Planesrunner" (2011), of which the first three chapters have been published to date. "Be My Enemy" is the second novel in the series and has now been translated into Italian and published in Urania. The novel is set in a reality contemporary to ours, and the protagonist is a young English boy named Everett Singh, son of the great physicist of Punjabi origin Tajendra Singh and inventor of the "Infundibulum," the map of worlds that compose the so-called "Panoply" and that allows ultra-dimensional jumps by opening gateways through the different parallel universes of the multiverse. The first novel tells how Everett prevented Charles Villiers, the evil prime minister of the Plenum, the body that oversees the 10 known worlds of the Panoply, from seizing the Infundibulum and how he himself, after escaping his antagonist and the forces of the Plenum (supported by the technology of a mysterious alien species called "Thryn"), began to travel through the multiverse aboard the airship Everness in search of his missing father.

The plot here is enriched with new details and information about the overall scenario of the multiverse in which the story is set, as well as the continuation of the events where new forces and new challenges will severely test Everett's recognized unique and special talent in the entire multiverse, which can be described as a kind of prototype of a modern young hero. Born and raised in the London of one of the parallel worlds, Everett is in all respects a boy of his generation, who loves soccer (his skill as a goalkeeper and his support for the Tottenham Hotspurs are mentioned multiple times), and who misses his mother and sister, whom he had to leave behind to find his father and save the entire multiverse. At the same time, he authoritatively leads a dangerous expedition at the helm of a crew of strange "airish" people who speak "palari," a kind of secret language that has its roots in 17th-century England and today is a characteristic slang in the English homosexual community.

During the journey through the multiverse that makes up the "Panoply," a progressively darker and more mysterious overall plan will unfold before the eyes of the protagonist and the reader, where different forces make their appearance in a scenario at this point unpredictable for what its outcomes might be. Ian McDonald, born in 1960, has proven with this series to be an author not only brilliant and endowed both with scientific knowledge and great imagination but also immersed in the culture of his time. Capable of presenting himself as an author of horror novels as well as more complex science fiction, the "Everness" series is part of his most popular work and as such is as much followed as it is the subject of criticism of all kinds. If I had to draw a parallel, the series reminds me of "The Dark Tower" by Stephen King in terms of its content and structure. After all, Everett himself is somewhat reminiscent of Jake Chambers, and this too can be defined as an opus in every sense and a mix of genres and different influences, although the genre imprint here is different and perhaps made more complex by science fiction implications and real nightmares like that of nanotechnology.