Jack the Walker, and the eccentric human cast he has garnered, travel inwards to the world of King Sad Agel, and stumble into an immense affray with thousands of bats and mages and Epicenes and cronies. It is exactly at this point in “Walker of Worlds” that all hell breaks loose.

Most magic-realist science-fantasy novels-like John Crowley’s “Little, Big” and Mark Helprin’s “A Winter’s Tale,” both of which are invoked in the blurb-show a reverent quiet at the point where our world meets its maker, and characters may pass into their true selves. By the end of the book, after we have managed to walk with the large cast into a world deeper than ours, it is as though we had gone through the pain barrier in a dance marathon.

In “Walker of Worlds,” the first book of a projected sequence, “Chronicles of the King’s Tramp,” Tom De Haven almost fox-trots us into his grip for good by the time we’re halfway through. We are walking spermatozoa, Kube-McDowell suggests and, as we depart this world, it is likely we will leave our nest in ruins. There is a glad tale-telling energy about the book-just as there was about James Tiptree Jr.’s best stories-that carries one on, as though to joy but just as in Tiptree’s “A Momentary Taste of Being,” the message of “The Quiet Pools” is ultimately determinist and bleak. Some humans (he learns) have a genetic quirk that compels them into space, and those who remain behind are bound to the planet by what they lack. Christopher McCutcheon, who works for The Diaspora Project but who does not himself wish to embark, slowly analyzes his bruised self, his failed marriage group, his enigmatic father, and through a slightly over-complicated plot discovers something of the truth behind things.

Against fervent opposition, a private corporation is building spaceships to carry select populations to the stars. Kube-McDowell’s first novel, is of genuinely strong interest, but its underlying premise is devastating to the self-esteem of the human race.

Tom doherty books