InterWorld

About the InterWorld series

Joey Harker is spectacularly bad at directions -- he can get lost walking in a straight line -- until he discovers why: he's a Walker, able to slip between the countless parallel Earths that make up the Altiverse, a talent so rare that two opposing cosmic factions want him for their own war. HEX are sorcerers who treat the multiverse as raw material for magic; the Binary are a coldly rational, machine-minded collective who treat it as data to be optimized and pruned; and caught between them is InterWorld, a small band of alternate versions of Joey himself -- other Joeys from other Earths, each shaped differently by the world they grew up on -- who recruit him to help keep magic and science from tipping the balance permanently toward either side. Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves built the trilogy around a genuinely inventive hook: Joey's teammates are all the same person refracted across infinite realities, letting the series explore identity and difference through a cast that's simultaneously one character and dozens. InterWorld (2007) introduces Joey and the organization's ongoing war; The Silver Dream (2013) and Eternity's Wheel (2015), co-written with Michael Reaves' daughter Mallory Reaves, escalate the HEX/Binary conflict and bring the trilogy to its conclusion. Faster-paced and more overtly science-fantasy than most of Gaiman's solo prose, it's a YA multiverse-hopping adventure built for readers drawn to parallel-worlds premises and found-family team dynamics, with a genuinely clever central concept carrying it through all three books.

How to read this series

Read InterWorld in publication order -- InterWorld, The Silver Dream, Eternity's Wheel -- it's one continuous story following Joey Harker from his recruitment through the trilogy's concluding conflict, not three standalone adventures. No other Gaiman reading is required; it's a fully separate work from his adult prose fiction, co-written throughout with Michael Reaves (and, from The Silver Dream onward, his daughter Mallory Reaves), and reads as straightforward YA science-fantasy rather than the mythic, literary register of American Gods or Neverwhere. The trilogy is complete as of Eternity's Wheel (2015), with no further volumes announced.