The Third Rule of Time Travel (SF) - Philip Fracassi ****

There are plenty of novels featuring time travel out there, but this is one of the more interesting ones. In a 2040s lab, owned by a tech billionaire, a pair of brilliant scientists have discovered a kind of time travel - but it's different from the usual variety.

There's no physical travel - the person simply experiences a short passage of time from their past. But it's not a memory: the device sends their mind into the ether and somehow (thanks to the wonders of negative energy) they are 'really' present for the 90 seconds limit of the visit. However, there's no control over the destination time - Beth, the central character - is intensely focused on finding some way to control this, left with dwindling resources and without the help of her husband who was killed in a car accident.

So far, a little bit 'meh' as time travel goes - it might be more real than a memory, but the experience appears to be the same as a perfect memory (that third rule is 'the traveller has no ability to interact with the world they have travelled to'). It's hard to see why anyone would invest vast sums of money in this research. But about 100 pages in, things kick up a gear as it becomes obvious that not everything is what it seems, while the stakes become far higher for Beth.

I did very much enjoy the book, though there a few small points. Beth herself is a really irritating character who seems almost always to be angry and despite being supposedly highly intelligent can only interact with the man funding her work by shouting at him. I did wince at one bit of the science - it's fine for the mechanisms to be handwaving (it always will be for time travel), but a journalist interviewing Beth says 'I've heard we're years away from [quantum entanglement] having practical, real world applications' - Beth doesn't correct this, but it's way off. The first entanglement-based encryption payment was made in 2004, and entanglement is a fundamental part of quantum computers which are at the heart of the experiment. Someone should have spotted this.

Recently I read another science fiction novel, There is No Antimimetics Division and commented that the ending was a bit deus ex machina, but that didn't spoil the book. Here the ending is almost literally deus ex machina - but (somewhat to my surprise) it's still not a problem for what was a thought-provoking read.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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