Skip to main content

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.

Paperback: 
  
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more