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

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more