Tag: time travel

The Read Report — May 2024

Summer is here, and I’m currently in the process of packing to move. It turns out you can acquire a shocking amount of junk when you spend almost 15 years in a house, so I’m going through it and getting rid of everything I can.

This past month was light on reading, but I did manage to get through a couple of books.

Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of Armageddon bunkers for billionaires.

Hogfather

By Terry Pratchett

I’m still reading Discworld with the kids at bedtime. This title features some of my favorite recurring characters: Death (and the miniature rat version, the Death of Rats); Susan, his grand-daughter; the wizards of Unseen University; and the mysterious and villainous Auditors, who are not permitted to meddle in the affairs of mortals, but keep coming up with clever schemes to wipe them out so the universe can be neat and orderly.

The Discworld version of Death is, in some ways, the classic trope of the robot who wants to become human. He may be an anthropomorphic personification, but he has spent centuries around people, and he can’t help that they’ve rubbed off on him.

Thanks to the Auditors, the Hogfather (Discworld’s version of Santa Claus) is missing in action, and it’s up to Death to take his place and keep the world believing in him. It’s a Nightmare Before Christmas with ancient gods and extra-dimensional monsters.

Susan is pulled into Death’s schemes against her will, determined (but mostly failing) to live a “normal” life instead of the inevitably strange life of the woman whose grandfather is the personification of Death.

Hogfather is a meditation on the way people create the gods they need, while also being a completely silly story about bumbling wizards, a skeleton posing as a mall Santa with a strap-on beard, and a governess who actually finds the monsters under the children’s beds, and resolves the issue with the sharp end of the fire poker.

Novelty

By John Crowley

Novelty is a book of four stories, two longer, and two shorter. Its themes and some elements of its plots are very science-fictiony, but the style is literary. It feels like a 1980s precursor to the “new weird” of Jeff Vandermeer or China Miéville.

“The Nightingale Sings at Night” begins in classic myth-story fashion with an explanation of the nightingale’s unusual song. It’s a retelling of the fall of man from Genesis, but the structure feels like something straight out of Aesop’s Fables. It’s a great example of using a classic story structure as a jumping-off point.

“Great work of time” is the longest story of the bunch, and a fantastic time travel story. Like all time travel stories, it’s linear from one perspective and non-linear from another.

Caspar Last is an imminently reasonable man who invents a time machine and decides to use it only once, in order to make enough money to live out the rest of his days in moderate comfort. However, he is tricked into giving up his invention to a secretive group calling themselves the Otherhood. They use the time machine, first and foremost, to sow peace around the world and build up the British Empire. They also use it to ensure their group’s own creation.

However, all this meddling in time has strange effects. The peace they create has its costs, twisting the world beyond all recognition. One member discovers that the Otherhood’s twisted timeline will eventually result in a sort of quiet cataclysm, a world so at peace that there is nothing but endless forest growing out of a quiet sea. The only way to prevent this terrible future is to undo everything the Otherhood has done.

“In Blue” is a story set some time in the future, in an unnamed city. Refugees crowd an ancient city that is being systematically rebuilt. There has been pseudo-communist Revolution, and lives are governed by a social calculus and act-field theory, mathematics that govern society and all interactions between people. The protagonist, Hare, is a member of the cadre that organizes society without overtly ruling it, but he becomes overwhelmed by his duties and has a mental break.

The final story, “Novelty” is the most literary (or, at least, the lightest on plot): a story about an author in a bar, realizing what his next book will be about. He decides he must write a book on the “pull men feel between Novelty and Security,” the drive to discover something new versus the safety of the known. The implication is that the story is at least a little autobiographical, and the book we’re reading is the book he will write.

What I’m Reading In June

I’m not sure how much reading I’ll actually be able to do, but I’m still working on the Witcher series and Discworld. I’m also continuing my goal of reading at least one anthology of short stories each month, and recently picked up a volume of stories from Apex which seems perfect for summer reading.

See you at the end of June!

This is How You Lose the Time War

In this novella by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, Red is a covert agent in a war raging across time. She is advanced beyond what we can comprehend as mere 21st-century readers, able to transform into whatever shape is needed, blending into any time and place, subtly adjusting the strands of causality to build new futures in a constantly shifting multiverse, the way generals build battlefield positions on the field of war.

One day, Red finds one of her carefully-laid plans foiled, and a playful message waiting for her from Blue, her counterpart on the opposing side. A rivalry takes shape, and from it, a romance. Attack and counter-attach across time, punctuated by ever more elaborate (and personal) coded messages.

Structure

For most of the book, each chapter follows one of these agents on a mission to a new place and time. Never enough to understand the purpose exactly, or the larger framing of the time war. Then, the text of a letter from one agent to the other. The next chapter, the point of view swaps.

I wondered at first how long the structure could sustain the story. However, the times and places are varied and tantalizing without being entirely clear, and the slow shift from rivalry to romance is believable and satisfying.

There is also an additional mystery woven throughout — an unidentified seeker that follows Red and Blue from chapter to chapter, studying and absorbing the correspondence they believe to be carefully hidden or destroyed. If they are found out, by their own superiors or the enemy, they will both be undone. Eventually, the back-and-forth structure does break down, and it’s the mystery of the seeker that comes to the fore and carries the story to its conclusion.

Respecting the Reader

In proper time-travel fashion, the story wraps around and through itself, as we discover that the characters are far more intertwined than even they knew. The authors make the wise decision to not go too deep into the details of time travel or the complexities of rewriting timelines across parallel universes. It mostly avoids, through obscurity, the inevitable inconsistencies that tend to bring out the worst kind of overly-pedantic reviewers.

The book doesn’t dawdle around, explaining the exact nature of the war, the two sides, or even the agents. We are thrown into a strange world head-first (many, in fact), and expected to keep up. We know that Red’s Agency faction uses advanced technology and bold tactics, and Blue’s Garden faction uses advanced biology and subtly turns the enemy’s strengths into weaknesses. And that’s enough.

I Feel Seen

The book has, at this point, won pretty much all of the best awards a sci-fi novella is eligible to win. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a bit like it was tailored to me.

I was delighted to find references to strategy in the game of Go (atari and lack of liberties). Granted, Go is probably more popular in the West than ever before, but it still feels like an obscure hobby. The characters also discuss Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison, a favorite of mine and the best book that I have ever discovered in a Little Free Library. I don’t expect these things to resonate with the average reader, but they further endeared the story to me.

To Summarize

This is the best book I’ve read in 2021, and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes sci-fi, time travel, romance or people who discover what really matters to them, and do everything in their power to protect it. The writing is ornate without being overwrought. The story takes some unexpected (but not unreasonable) twists and turns. It’s a quick read, but feels exactly long enough.

It is, in short, quite good. Go read it.