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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more