InterWorld
InterWorld is a fantasy and science fiction novel by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves. The book was published in 2007 by EOS, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It follows the story of Joey Harker who, together with a group of other Joeys from different Earths in other parallel universes, try to stop the two forces of magic and science from taking over all of the Earths in different universes.
Plot summary
Joey Harker is an average high school student living in Greenville. He had trouble finding his way around his own house, let alone the town. On a field trip set by his Social Studies teacher, Mr. Dimas, Joey found himself lost in the city. He then entered a strange fog and when he emerged, everything had changed. All the cars were brightly coloured and the police cars was flashing green and yellow instead of blue and red. He went back home and discovered that he does not exist anymore, instead a girl named Josephine lived there. He ran outside and met a man wearing a mirrored mask. The man introduced himself as Jay. Before Jay could explain anything, three men appeared, standing on floating silver disks and wearing grey outfits appeared, all trying to catch Joey using silver nets. Joey runs, unintentionally entering the fog again.Afraid of going back to a home where he doesn't exist, Joey decided to go to Mr. Dimas for help. When he met Mr. Dimas, Mr Dimas was shocked to see Joey, telling him that he had drowned last year and that Mr. Dimas himself had pulled Joey's body out of the river. Suddenly a woman appeared in the room, bewitching Joey into following her. She calls herself Lady Indigo and is joined by two other men. One, called Scarabus, had mystical tattoos all over his body. The other, a man with transparent skin, is called Neville. They moved Joey to a flying ship, the Lacrimae Mundi.
The ship teleports to Nowhere-at-all, a sort of hyperspace. They were heading towards a place called "HEX Prime".Before they could reach there, Jay arrived and helped Joey escape, getting himself injured in the process. Joey then opened a portal to the In-Between, a multidimensional world, where only Walkers and MDLF beings could enter. The in-between is a shortcut for traveling from world to world. Joey and Jay exited in-between and arrived at a desert. There Jay explained to Joey how he was a part of an organization called InterWorld and their job was to keep the altiverse balanced by stopping the scientific force from making worlds too scientific, while also stopping the magical force from making worlds too magical. Jay also said that Joey had the ability to "Walk", or go into the In-Between and other dimensions quickly and effectively.
After re-entering the "in-between", they met a mudluff which looked like a bubble and communicated using colours. It appeared to be trapped by something. Joey approaches it and as Joey tries to free the mudluff, a giant serpent appears, biting Jay. The mudluff kills the serpent but Jay was already dying. Before he dies he gave Joey the direction to Base Town, where InterWorld HQ is. With his dying breath, he showed Joey a mathematical equation that would lead to Base Town: :=Ω/∞. The mudluff then becomes attached to Joey and he names it "Hue". Joey then went to HQ and learns that all Walkers were all copies of himself from different Earths. He began an intense course of exercise while studying very advanced science and magic to prepare him for his new role as a member of the InterWorld. Many of the other Joeys initially resented Joey for causing Jay's death, but soon come around about him as his skills improve.
After a few months, Joey and four other Walkers went on a training mission. They were supposed to retrieve some signal beacons in a more scientific earth. But the earth they went to turned out to be a "shadow realm" and is in fact a trap, set by the same people who captured him earlier from HEX. Everyone in the team was captured by HEX, except Joey who was saved by Hue. When Joey escaped back to HQ, the leader, an old man named Joe, decided that Joey is not capable of working in InterWorld, and wiped Joey's mind of his life in InterWorld. Joey was then sent home, where he thought nothing had happened, but feels like something is missing. After some time, while blowing bubbles with his little brother, Joey remembers Hue, and every memory about the Altiverse comes back to him. With all those memories back, Joey said goodbye to his family, Walks into the Altiverse again, and set off to save his teammates.
With Jay's words in his head and Hue's help, Joey finds the airship where his teammates were being held, and lands safely on it. However, he was captured as well and taken to meet Lord Dogknife, a large hideous goblin who led the people who captured his teammates. Joey was then taken to the room where his teammates are being held. A large cauldron is in the center of the room, built to capture their souls to power the ship. The HEX boil down Walkers to their raw essence, which was used as power supplies for their transdimensional spacecraft.
Joey manages to move over to the cauldron and knocked it over, incinerating some of the guards in the room. He then moved over to untie his friends, who all try to find an exit. They found an exit and escaped to the engine room.
The engine room was filled with souls from other Walkers, powering the ship. Joey and his teammates broke the jars containing them to free the souls and shut the ship down. The engine explodes, and Joey and his teammates plan an escape from the Nowhere-At-All. They talk of a gate in the Nowhere-At-All from which they can escape, but it was closing quickly. Joey decides he would not leave without Hue, because it had saved his life multiple times.
Many soldiers then came into the destroyed engine room in an attempt to recapture Joey and his teammates, along with Scarabus. J/O, a cyborg Joey, offered a duel and defeated Scarabus, and everyone went to find Lord Dogknife.
Dogknife was in the room where Joey saw him earlier, captured by the souls and thus rendered harmless. Joey finds Hue and escapes with his teammates. They were about to escape when Lady Indigo appeared to face them. Joey distracts her from fighting them with some powder in his pocket, and he and his teammates escaped through the gate before returning to Interworld HQ.
They return to the Old Man, who did not congratulate them for their heroic work. Instead, he lectured them on all their wrongdoings in the Altiverse. However, he now said that Joey was allowed to stay without wiping his memory. The group soon set out on another mission.
In other media
The idea of InterWorld surged in 1996, when Reaves was developing an animated series for DreamWorks. Suggesting to Gaiman an idea for a possible animated television series, they collaborated on the story and unsuccessfully tried to sell it to various studios, including DreamWorks, which was not interested. The InterWorld idea ended up being a novel that was not released until 2007.On June 16, 2007, Neil Gaiman reported in his journal that DreamWorks Animation optioned the book to make it into an animated feature film.
On June 21, 2016, the previous plans to make InterWorld a television series had become active once again by Universal Cable Productions, in association with Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller and his partner Flody Suarez.