Zelda has spent the last ten years paying for a mistake messing with powers she shouldn’t have touched. Those ten years were full of cleaning up after that mistake, terrible jobs with worse pay, and no one ever saying thank you. But, at the beginning of Last Exit, by Max Gladstone, Zelda has a chance to put things right again. All she has to do is get her friends on board with her (not actually a) plan to save the world and her long-lost love.
Last Exit is a melancholy book. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since this book is set at the end of the world. (I might have recommended some trimming at several points in this book.) Zelda and her friends’ only hope is reclaiming their old magic. Except, they never call it magic. To them it’s math or spin or a knack. When they were in college, Zelda, Sal, Ish, Ramón, and Sarah figured out how to use uncertainty and chance to step out of our world and into alternate ones. They went on all kinds of adventures until, one day, they went too far. Sal was lost and rot started to seem out into all the worlds. Hence, Zelda’s ten-year penance.
We jump from character to character over the course of most of Last Exit, learning everyone’s backstories and their regrets. We also learn more about the alternate worlds and the rot. A lot of these worlds are fairly bleak. There are differences, but it seems like our band of would-be heroes keep stumbling on worlds that have fallen from some kind of golden age. Now it’s all references to cannibal gangs and roving drones and there is a really thrilling scene out of Mad Max. We never learn what made all those civilizations fall, but there are hints that it was either overreaching and someone unleashed something unspeakable or because someone took too much control and stiffled all the life out of the place.
I’m trying hard not to knock this book, but it’s not until near the end that the pace picks up. Once Zelda gets the gang together and a truly terrifying baddie shows up, Last Exit really takes off. The melancholy (which never really goes away) starts to resolve into a big question about what it means to save the world. Does it mean preserving what we have (at the cost of our privacy)? Does it mean sacrificing safety for a chance at a brand new life? And, perhaps most interestingly, what does it mean to save the world when we struggle so much to even envision a better world?