That cracking sound you hear 50 pages or so into Lady of Mazes, the new science fiction novel from Toronto writer Karl Schroeder? No, that’s not the sound of a fictional world coming to an end. It’s the sound of your brain splitting open. It’s okay – it’s supposed to do that.

Though set in the same distant future universe that was home to Schroeder’s previous novel, Ventus, Lady of Mazes can easily be read without any knowledge of the prior book. The new novel tells the story of Livia Kodaly, a young woman of the Westerhaven manifold, one of an overlapping multitude of realities strung along a ringworld. When the ringworld, called Teven Coronal, is attacked by a mysterious force that collapses the borders between the manifolds, Livia is one of a band of survivors who take to space to find assistance in defending their homes. What they find instead is the Archipelago, a sprawling world that contains both the secrets of their past and the engines of their future.

No brief description can do justice to Schroeder’s imagination. The physical, philosophical, and cultural underpinnings of his world are integral to the narrative, in which the fates of millions hinge on individual moral choices and values. In the manifolds – and beyond – reality is a construct, and this is reflected throughout the novel, as Schroeder keeps the reader continually unsettled. His language is terse and direct, almost crystalline in its precision, all the better to reveal the amorphous, nebulous quality of Kodaly’s world. Nothing is a given, nothing can be taken for granted, and there are surprises on almost every page.

While rooted in cutting-edge philosophy and ideas, the novel never skimps on its characters and their inter-relationships, and is genuinely moving. Karl Schroeder is definitely one to watch.