Have you ever read something that you recognize isn't bad but /is/ a bad book?
Welcome to "InterWorld" by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, a book I will be keeping because I have hoarding tendencies. Since I own most of Gaiman's novels, it feels improper to get rid of this title. (It's the inverse of Orson Scott Card, where the author revealed himself to be so toxic I steadily pared down my collection until I was left with "Ender's Game", the object an anchor for my grade eight camping trip and the taste of fresh caught fish cooked over an open fire and eaten with fingers in cool-damp morning.)
"InterWorld" is the most 'let's try to scrape some kind of profit from the time sunk into this project by settling for this ill-fitting adaptation' I've ever encountered. We've all seen unaired TV pilot retooled was TV movie and I know there are self-conscious 'this sitcom pitch got turned down, maybe podcast?' examples out there, and I know old school webcomics that dropped the comic part when there was a falling out with the artist and tried to continue via text alone. The last is probably the closest to "InterWorld", probably because Gaiman and Reaves both had success doing the writing part of visual media (Gaiman's bibliography in that area is well known, while Reaves was head writer for Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles).
It's explicitly admitted in the book's endnote that "InterWorld" was the result of Gaiman and Reaves trying to produce something for tv executives that would make the premise for their series pitch easier to understand (this was before they unlocked the 'throw things into landfill for infinite tax benefit cheat code') and I'm not convinced they put that much time into making it a book-book for publication. There's a real sticks and glue feeling to "InterWorld" and you're expecting a house. Not a big fancy house, not a mansion, just a little default filler house. But you don't have to look at the sticks you were given for long before realizing 'aw shit man this is a repurposed boat'.
The idea of "InterWorld" is a multiverse middle grade adventure battle between extreme forces of magic/chaos and technology/order because what kid doesn't want robots /and/ dragons? There's an organization charged with keeping worlds from falling fully under the control of either side. The twist is that the organization is staffed entirely by versions of the same person from different worlds.
This is a genuinely cool idea and great for kids who aren't quite teenagers, giving Gaiman and Reaves a lot of avenues to explore different genders, cultures, species, just identity in general and how different circumstances can see the same seed growing into wildly varied plants. It's easy to imagine how interesting this could be.
In a visual medium.
Especially something animated, where you could create character designs allowing the viewer to immediately distinguish Main Character Joey from Girl Joey from Joey But Robot.
In writing "The Warrior's Apprentice", Lois McMaster Bujold wanted to name the love interest "Nile". Her protagonist? "Miles". Feedback on the proofreading and copyediting nightmare of a Miles and Nile in the same book saw "Nile" become "Elena".
Please enjoy imagining how frustrating an entire book full of J-name variant characters is, because it is the thing that marks "InterWorld" most clearly as something that should never have been a book and also just a constant little itching in my eye and brain.
Double-checking some things in writing this up reveals that Gaiman and Reaves did publish two sequels, well after the fact. I'm surprised because another thing that made the book feel unlike a book is that it finished not only with loose threads of plot dangling, but with the greatest implied conflict unresolved. A villain from the tech end of the spectrum wasn't even present and my reaction, on finishing the book, was 'well sure, you wouldn't have written the arcs of multiple seasons into this pitchbook, you'd have the establishing arc and maybe one or two bits of adventure after that'.
If I ever stumbled across the following books on the cheap I might pick them up, but I feel no compulsion to do so, and "InterWorld" remains on my shelf as a curio more than a book.
