An epic space opera from bestselling and award winning author Tim Pratt, perfect for fans of Peter F. Hamilton and Adrian Tchaikovsky. Nigh-Space: a continuum of parallel realities, encompassing our own universe, along with worlds far more technologically advanced and infinitely more strange. It's possible to travel from one world to another, if you have the right technology, though the farther you venture from your home world and its immediately adjacent realities, the more bizarre and dangerous things become. Most of the people (and other intelligent entities) who live on those worlds have no idea about the universes next door--but some do, and they all have their own agendas. Some want to exploit the power differentials between levels of Nigh-Space for their own gain, and others want to protect the denizens of those worlds from being exploited. Conquest of Nigh-Space is a multiversal space opera about the clash between those opposing worldviews. As the novel begins, a young programmer named Tamsin Culver returns from San Francisco to her Midwestern hometown to settle her grandmother's estate after the old woman is killed in a home invasion.
She soon discovers her Granny's secrets: she was not native to our world, but an exile from an adjacent reality ("The Old Country") with highly advanced technology, where she once ruled as an oligarch. Tamsin is heir to vast wealth on the other side, hidden away in vaults accessible only by someone from her bloodline. but the enemies who tried to exterminate her family won't be happy to see her return. Fortunately, she gets help from her ex-boyfriend Trevor, who is more than the simple dirtbag he seems, and also engages the services of a pair of infamous mercenaries from the Old Country, Bollard and Chicane, who agree to help her regain her family's power for the promise of wealth in return. Tamsin is sick of her boring life in this world; she wants to become a princess of Nigh-Space. Meanwhile, back in the Bay Area, a grad student named Glenn discovers his girlfriend Vivy is secretly an agent of an interdimensional organization devoted to promoting freedom and protecting the denizens of Nigh-Space: the Interventionists. When she gets in trouble, Glenn is drawn to a distant level of Nigh-Space, where solar parasites poison star systems and hostile aliens seek to destroy access to other planes. He meets up with Vivy's friend, a sapient starship named The Wreck of the Edmund Pevensie ("Call me Eddie"), and they join forces to save her.
Glenn and Vivy naturally have to work out some relationship issues, like her lying to him about a) her real job and b) the entire nature of reality. It's not easy being in love with a champion of Nigh- Space, but it's never dull.