Blog tour: Opposite World by Elizabeth Anne Martins

This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘Piper “Pip” Screed remembers nothing about her mother’s mysterious death or the strange episode that left her in a deep, unexplained sleep. All she knows is that her father uprooted them to a secluded mountain cabin, severed all ties to the outside world, and refuses to answer her questions.

‘Fifteen years later, Pip escapes isolation and discovers The Reverie Cloud – a revolutionary sleep therapy programme that merges the subconscious with virtual reality. Here, users can experience their desires, confront fears, and rewrite their pasts in a dreamscape indistinguishable from reality.

‘But when The Reverie Cloud falls into the hands of those who see her subconscious as a prize, Pip becomes ensnared within its unstable architecture. Now locked inside the programme, she must navigate its mercurial layers, face the horrors buried within her subconscious, and unravel the truth about her past before time runs out. Worse, she’s not the only one at risk – her father’s life hangs in the balance, too.

‘But the deeper Pip ventures, the more dangerous the game becomes. If she pushes too far, she may never escape. Yet only by confronting the truth can she hope to uncover what really happened to her mother – before the program consumes her entirely.’

In Opposite World, by Elizabeth Anne Martins, we follow main character Pip Screed from her childhood, when she lives off-grid in the Snoqualmie woods with her reclusive widower father, through to young adulthood, when she gets a job with a tech company and becomes hooked on one of their clients’ products: a sleep therapy programme called The Reverie Cloud.

The Reverie Cloud gives users the opportunity to consciously shape and interact with dreamscapes, whether they want to do-over painful memories to overcome traumas or boost their confidence, participate in exciting video game-like adventures, or simply relax and unwind in tranquil settings precisely tailored to them.

Pip hopes to access buried memories that answer some burning questions she has: what was behind the convulsive attacks she suffered as a child, one of which knocked her out for months? How did her mother die? Why did her father become so paranoid and move them out to the sticks following her mother’s death?

As it turns out, Pip isn’t the only one looking for something in her subconscious: the people behind the software have reason to believe she’s the key to some information that could make them very rich and powerful indeed – and they’ll do whatever it takes to get at it.

As soon as I saw the blurb for Opposite World, I just knew I had to read it. A couple of years ago, I wrote a short story where a fictionalised version of myself used a VR therapy programme to interact with her younger self at moments when she’d needed to feel seen and understood, but I was never quite happy with the ending, so I was really curious to see what Martins made of a not-dissimilar premise. And the answer is: so much!

This story is a real feat of imagination. Not only is The Reverie Cloud itself – the six types of scenario it presents to the user, and the multitudes contained within them – full of wonders and well-realised, but its pertinence to Pip’s life before she starts actively using it as an adult, and the consequences it could have for both individual users and society as a whole if it was widely adopted, are cleverly conceived and well-thought-out.

For all its potential benefits, The Reverie Cloud is riddled with risks and dangers. An individual could choose to use it to overcome their personal traumas – or a military could impose it on soldiers, turning them into killing machines by pushing them to reconcile with their past actions, or even changing their memories themselves, thereby limiting the psychological effects of committing atrocities.

As Pip finds, the programme is not only an addictive escape from reality, but a way for bad actors to get at her. Forced into the sixth, most experimental dreamscape option, she has to prevent the programme’s creators from seeing something in her memories that would send its potential for harm stratospheric, while fighting off enemies who have joined her in the same simulation, and trying to escape before she’s trapped there forever.

In case that wasn’t bad enough, Pip also becomes horribly aware of the dangers of interacting with the master versions of memories, as opposed to copies of them created for therapeutic purposes. For one thing, we are our memories, so any inorganic (i.e. beyond the way they naturally alter each time we consciously recall them) tampering with them is destabilising at best, and catastrophic at worst. For another, some mind-bending (and delightfully spooky) temporal weirdness occurs, as strange experiences Pip has in her waking life come to be explained by subsequent interactions with her memories. It’s all very intense!

The marketing materials for Opposite World liken it to a number of books that are now on my TBR list, as well as the film Inception. To these, I would add Maggie Stiefvater’s Dreamer Trilogy where, like Pip, the characters have to learn to control their dreamscapes or else be controlled by them, and Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out, which was brought to my mind by Pip’s “memory carousel” and strategic retreat to particularly stable “core memories”.

Not unlike memories, Opposite World isn’t perfect – I groaned a little when Pip doodled a superlative app interface on her first try, without any training or experience in UI design that I was aware of, and the last few chapters dragged a little and might have been condensed into the epilogue. Even so: what a read.

Opposite World is imaginative, sophisticated, and full of suspense.