The Psychology of Time Travel (SF) - Kate Mascarenhas ****

In some ways, time travel is a mainstay of science fiction - one of the key tropes, even though it's a technology that is never likely to be made practical. However, a surprising amount of time travel fiction (think, for example, of practically all of Dr Who), simply uses time travel as a vehicle to get to a particular time without exploring the convolutions and complexities that the time travel produces. I suspect this is often because it's difficult to present a story laden with time paradoxes without the reader losing track. 

Certainly many of the best attempts, such as Heinlein's All You Zombies, have been short stories that limit the potential for confusion. Plenty of kudos then to Kate Mascarenhas for giving us a novel that really plunges into time travel up to its elbows yet remains easy to follow. In general I don't like books where the reader keeps being switched to flashbacks and flashforwards - it quickly becomes irritating. Yet even though practically every chapter (62 of them) involves a jump around in time, I never became disoriented - Mascarenhas handles this very well.

The book is sold as a murder mystery - and there is a murder in there (sort of), but that is not really what it's about, as the title suggests. Instead it's an engaging exploration of the way that the possibility of time travel would influence human behaviour - the kind of thing that good science fiction does best - far better than most literary fiction.

The criticisms I have of this book, strangely as it's very much of its time, are mostly SF problems that date back to the 1950s. I recently re-read Asimov's Foundation and its biggest failings are two-dimensional characters and no women in significant roles. Similarly, Mascarenhas never develops her characters to any extent and here we get the inverse of Asimov - there are no men in significant roles. And that's just as limiting as Asimov's approach. Someone who hasn't read much modern science fiction might argue this is addressing an imbalance in the genre (though two wrongs don't make a right) - but actually, if anything it's more common to have a female protagonist than a male one these days.

Another 1950s issue that derives more from comics than science fiction novels is the reliance on an unknown element to be the MacGuffin to make SF technology work. Even the vaguest understanding of chemistry makes an unknown element nigh-on impossible - so it's a shame Mascarenhas resorts to this to power her time machines. There's also a device that's central to the plot that supposedly was sold as a toy. It's a tiny time machine that projects a small object (intended to be a sweet) a minute or so into the future. This crashes through the suspension of disbelief. The idea that a device powered by a dangerous radioactive element and presumably extremely expensive to make could be sold as child's gimmick toy that's no more fun to play with than a simple magic trick is bizarre.

However, none of these faults was sufficient to spoil the enjoyment of a cleverly plotted novel.

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Review by Brian Clegg
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