Skip to main content

The Memory Collectors (SF) - Dete Meserve ****

Dete Meserve structures her novel around four characters, each getting their own chapter in rotation until storylines start to cross. This is a difficult approach to engage with, as after the first four chapters it's hard to have any connection to a character, but in the context of the storyline it makes sense, and after a while everything does start to fit into place.

Each of our four is making a journey back in time using new technology developed by Californian startup Aeon Expeditions (founded by ex-husband of one of the four, Elizabeth). This is not time travel as science fiction usually portrays it. It is reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's striking time travel novel The House on the Strand. In that book, the protagonist is able to mentally travel back to the fourteenth century, while his body remains in the present (putting him in danger, as his physical body moves across the landscape following the mental one in the past). in Meserve's book, the characters do travel back to a point in their past where they experience an hour being themselves at that point in time (not with their present bodies), but are able to act independently from their past lives, even though as soon as they return, the timeline snaps back to the way it was.

As we get into the plot, Meserve beautifully handles weaving together the four stories, ending up with a real page-turner for the chapters where, during a single day, all four live new versions of a life-altering event. I had to stay up late to get through these chapters - the whole thing is done with flair. My only slight moan plot-wise is the ending, which ties everything up with a bow and skirts over the apparent implication that at least one of the characters should be charged with murder. But that doesn't really matter - at the heart of the book is a 'what-if' of what would we do if we were sent back to a crucial turning point in our lives, with the potential to experience it differently, even though it won't change the real world.

Time travel is theoretically possible but not practically doable, so even with modern physics in mind, SF resorts to McGuffins to make it happen. Although there may be a scientific sugar-coating, under the hood whether it's the TARDIS, a DeLorean with a flux capacitor or Wells' Time Machine, what we experience is no more scientific than Mark Twain's use of a bump on the head in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Meserve weaves in suitable scientific terms like closed time-like curves, but leaving aside the practical impossibilities of using these, the physics would not enable travel to before they were invented - and they would not magically transform you back into your past body. But as there isn't a true hard science time travel story, we have to just go with the flow.

Overall, the premise is fascinating and despite the unlikely time travel mode, it was an engaging read, climaxing with the fateful day where it becomes an energetic page-turner. 

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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