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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more