March bukes

[realthog]

And so another month draws to its close, another milestone along the dusty road of time . . . you know the general schtick. In the latter part of this month I began reading time travel novels, and my notes on these in particular are a bit packed with spoilers; accordingly, and not just because my collection of notes is so bloody long, I'll put everything behind the cut.

The Best of Cold Blood (1998) edited by Peter Sellers and John North

A few years ago Pam and I were in Toronto for a few days on business and discovered that, in a park almost across the road from our "hotel" (the quotation marks are another story), there was a book festival. Across we went, met up with a bunch of skiffy authors (Rob Sawyer, Jim Gardner and others, plus very nearly Robert Charles Wilson except that while we were there he was being monopolized by people wanting their books signed) at the booth they'd hired; that evening, obviously, some carousing went on.

It was at this festival that I discovered a dealer had a mountain of copies of the US edition of my Masters of Animation to clear at something like Cdn$4 apiece; I bought the lot, Rob Sawyer kindly lent me his wheely-cart to get them back to the hotel, and I've been selling them at full price at cons ever since. It's the signature as adds the value, you see.

Also at this festival we picked up a bunch of Canadian-published books -- books that, for cultural-imperialist reasons, one has virtually zero chance of ever finding for sale just a few hundred miles to the south. Some of the books concerned were being given away for free, and that made the acquisition process even easier.

One of these latter was the book I've just read. Cold Blood was an anthology series edited for the most part by Peter Sellers (with the assistance in the latter stages of John North) and published by Mosaic Press (also the publisher of the well known horror series Northern Frights). This is the Sellers/North pick of the series' five volumes.

At the outset it should be said that this book is riddled with all the characteristics that give the small press a bad name. It seems that neither Sellers/North nor Mosaic Press have much truck for delicacies like copyediting and proofreading. As far as I can guess, the authors' original digital files were simply slung together into a single document, from which the typesetting was done without further human intervention. Thus all the authors' typos, formatting fuckups and other peccadilloes are preserved intact for the world to see. I mean, it's in a curious way pleasing that crimewriting great Peter Robinson has the same habit as me of representing en-dashes by spaced double-hyphens, but this was not something I'd ever expected to discover within the pages of a supposedly professionally published book.

Leaving this sloppiness aside -- and it's in practice a pretty big set-aside, because sometimes the irritation makes the reading difficult -- this anthology is better than about 80% of those you're likely to come across from publishers with vast amounts more money and practical expertise. One or two of the stories are pretty nondescript -- including, sadly, the opener, William Bankier's very contrived "The Best of Birtles" -- but others are a joy. James Powell's "The Tamerlane Crutch" merrily conflates A Christmas Carol and The Maltese Falcon. Charlotte MacLeod's "Tale of a Tub" is both very funny and very poignant: a fundie preacher in a small town that makes the Backwoods seem metropolitan solves the mystery of who stabbed a miser. Jas R. Petrin's "Man on the Roof" is a white-knuckle human drama for anyone with latent vertigo; I guessed the twist ending before the end, but not very much before, so count it as a successful surprise. Peter Robinson's "Fan Mail", apparently his first published story, is a well written, wicked piece of dark humour. I don't think Mary Jane Maffini's "Naked Truths" -- about a murder in a nudist colony -- is an especially distinguished story, but in its clever little observations it succeeds in being in places surprisingly sexy (I did definitely sigh when our young female narrator told us, "I was busy trying to get used to the feel of the vinyl seats"). Vivienne Gornall's "Current Events" has one cheering the murderer on -- probably a bad thing but, since the victims are spousal abusers . . .

Others are . . . not so good. Ted Wood's "Murder in the Green" pissed me off quite a lot because its raison d'etre seemed to be to take stupid potshots at environmentalists. Eric Wright's "Hephaestus" struck me as not only a mediocre tale but an amateurishly told one; to its credit, it did leave me chilled with its envoi. Sellers's own "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" was well enough told but is really a not particularly interesting urban legend recast as a story. And so on. Yet almost all of the stories here have a sort of vigour that comes from a lack of world-weary complacency: they seem to expect to engage with their readers rather than just present the printed equivalent of episode #436 of some template tv cop show.

To repeat: What's astounding, overall, is how good this anthology is bearing in mind that the Sellers/Mosaic budget was presumably minuscule. Cold Blood was evidently a very considerable achievement for small-press publishing; the bigger presses might learn a lot from this book. I almost wish I'd paid for it . . .


The Killing Doll (1984) by Ruth Rendell

Glancing at the publication date of this, 1984, I was prepared to describe it as an early Rendell; yet according to the "Also by" list on the half-title verso she'd already by this time published a dozen Wexford novels (which surprised me less), ten of her psychological thrillers and three books of short stories. (I've no idea if by 1984 she'd instituted her Barbara Vine alter ego.)

The main focus is on brother and sister Pup and Dolly; he as a boy sold his soul to the Devil and took up the practice of ritual White Magic, although since discovering sex he's grown out of such fancies; she, the older sibling, has had a life marred by people's negative attitudes toward her facial nevus and latterly by her steady heavy drinking, and refuses to believe her little brother isn't a powerful magus -- a conception bolstered by some not-too-implausible coincidences, primarily the sudden death of the pair's despised stepmother after a cod ritual involving the desecration of a doll of her. Dolly, having attended far too many faked Spiritualist meetings, is convinced the ghosts of her mother and now the stepmother accompany her everywhere, commenting on her every action and offering her advice whether or not it's needed.

A secondary focus of the plot concerns the seriously insane Diarmit Bawne, who lives undiagnosed nearby; already his profound delusions have led him to murder and mutilate an innocent. Much of the tension of The Killing Doll is our knowledge of the inevitability of these two plot strands being brought together . . .

Absorbing, claustrophobic, powerful: all the usual adjectives applied to Rendell's psychological thrillers apply here. It's not in the top drawer of those, but it's a well-wrought piece nonetheless.


Codex (2004) by Lev Grossman

Investment whizkid Edward is offered a prestigious transfer from NYC to London, and decides to take a couple of weeks off in between the two positions. He's asked by his employers to do one thing during this fortnight -- a quick favour for a rich client, an aristocratic English couple. This proves to be a request to catalogue the family's ancestral collection of rare books -- a major task rather than the quick service advertised. Before he can refuse, though, he inexplicably decides to go through with it. He is particularly requested to keep an eye out for a 14th-century codex by one Gervase of Langford, a book believed to be a ghost title invented by a much later manuscript forger. Of course, Edward gets it into his head that -- as the family has always maintained -- the codex really exists, and his obsessive quest for it, alongside the near-autistic post-doc medievalist Margaret, forms the basis of this tale.

Woven through the central plot is a secondary one about Edward's increasing addiction to a virtual-reality game called MOMUS (after the Greek god thrown out of Olympus for his habit of pointing out all the ways creation could be improved). All kinds of parallels between and intersections of his adventures within the game and those outside it appear with a tacit sounding of portentous chords, although in the end all these come to nothing: they're just unnecessary plot complications.

But these aren't as irritating as all the plotting lapses, mostly involving Edward's motivations. As noted above, it's inexplicable why he should take on a task that's completely alien to his interests, experience and expertise: he just does, because it suits the author's purposes that he should. Likewise, throughout the book it's occasionally trotted out as a motivation for this or that action that Edward is infatuated by the Duchess, co-owner with her despised husband, the Duke, of the book collection; yet Edward has met the Duchess only briefly, she's of an older generation, there was no spark of attraction between them during that meeting, and the relationship between Duchess and Duke was portrayed at the time as testily affectionate. In the end we are supposed to believe that hotshot Wall Street high-flyer Edward is prepared to throw away his entire career, not to mention his belatedly burgeoning love for Margaret, in hopes of a life with an older woman he's barely met and for whom he seems to have any warm emotion only when the author finds it convenient. I kept hoping for some final revelation of the reasons why these two enormous plot implausibilities (there are others) should somehow make sense, but it never came.

The first chapter or so of Codex is written in the Dan Brown textual mode: a sort of determined mediocrity. Thereafter, though, things improve a lot, and much of the book is definitely compelling, especially the passages dealing with true and invented literary history, the contents of the supposed codex, the nature of the medieval mind, etc. (For a while I thought this book might be the antithesis of the student-writer cliche "show, don't tell" because I was enjoying all the genuine or imitation infodumping so much.) In other words, after its rocky beginning, Codex is a good fast read, but at it's end I felt I'd somehow been cheated.

I'm planning, because of multiple recommendations, to read Grossman's The Magicians soon, and hope I enjoy it better.


The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy

Told largely through the eyes of the child Rahel, one of a pair of non-identical twins, this is primarily a portrait of how a single person's malevolent self-interest can poison so much around her; other virulent toxins -- notably the relics of the caste system -- play their part in the novel's slowly unfolding tragedy, but it's really the bitter, aging, totally self-serving spinster Baby Kochamma whose venom drives events.

The focus is a spell of a few days when the children Rahel and her brother Estha await the arrival of and then become friends with their half-English cousin Sophie Mol, the latter's tragic death, and the aftermath. Interwoven is the disaster of their mother Ammu's passionate relationship with a local lad, Velutha -- disastrous because Velutha is an Untouchable.

Although the adult Rahel appears somewhat sparingly in the book, as she a couple of decades later revisits her old home, the scene of so much pain, in a way she's a conduit through which we learn the tale. This, at least, is how I read the narrative's extraordinarily fanciful language, riddled with nonce-words and chantlike repetitions: we're being presented with a tale coloured by Rahel's recollections of her childhood self. For the most part that language is gloriously evocative, with occasional sentences I found myself wanting to reread just for the pleasure of the words (there's a sort of Alfred Besterish lust for linguistic games at work here); but all too often, alas, it dives into the irritatingly self-indulgent or twee. A few examples from many:

[]   It made him smile out loud.
[]   . . . she listened with her eyes.
[]   He hurried with his mind. [Roy liked this one so much she used it twice.]
[]   Estha put his head in his [own] lap. [A neat trick if you can do it.]
[]   But she said it with her dimples . . .
[]   His face was neither lifted towards the rain, nor bent away from it.

As you'll have guessed, I ended up having very equivocal feelings about Roy's use of language. Was it really serving the tale, or was it just a pretentious lack of discipline? Such concerns were underscored by the unconscionable amount of time Roy takes over the telling of the earlier parts of her story: the narrative swirls around for long chapters during which there are all kinds of verbal pyrotechnics but little or no progress toward the nub of the tale. Finally, perhaps fifty or seventy pages from the end, a momentum does start to build up, so that eventually I was being carried along by an ever-swifter, ever-stronger current; the novel's climax is indeed traumatic, but I suspect quite a few readers, confronted by countless tiresomenesses in the first four-fifths of the book, won't have got that far.

Oh, and there's a scene in the book's concluding pages that should have (and for all I know may have) been nominated for the relevant year's Bad Sex Award. I have no quibble with the scene being there -- in fact, I'd say that for the novel's sake it's structurally necessary that it be so -- but I do have qualms over its execution.

All in all, then, I'm still very much in two minds about this novel. I do recognize its many strengths, I applaud Roy's courage in playing so roughly with the English language, I laughed in all (or at least most of) the right places, I near-wept over the events of the finale, and I 'd say the book was, because of its linguistic ambition if for no other reason, worthy of the Booker Prize it won; yet all at the same time so much about it was irritating me that I'm not sure it won't be the case that, in memory, it'll be the irritation that wins out.


The Manual of Detection (2009) by Jedediah Berry

In an unnamed city which has certain resemblances to early-20th-century New York, many matters are regulated by the Agency, a large, somewhat Kafkaesque organization whose hierarchy runs, in descending order: Watchers, Detectives, Clerks, Under-Clerks. There's not much direct communication between the members of these four strata.

Charles Unwin is the clerk whose responsibility it is to formalize, index and file the case reports of Detective Travis Sivart, the city's most prominent detective. One day he is abruptly informed that he has been promoted to fill the shoes of Sivart, who has gone missing, and is given a copy of the eponymous Manual of Detection to guide him. Plucking up all his courage, he goes to see the watcher who has made this appointment, hoping to persuade him it has all been a mistake and to restore the status quo, but by the time he gets there the man has been murdered; and soon thereafter Unwin finds himself framed for that crime. He spends most of the rest of the book in quest of the elusive Sivart, discovering along the way that there were flaws in the solutions of several of Sivart's most celebrated cases, and that some of the supervillains with whom Sivart has vied are perhaps not what they've seemed.

In particular, Unwin learns that the standard edition of The Manual of Detection is missing a chapter, the one on oneiric detection -- detection through dreams. Thus, while much of the novel's action takes place in mundane reality (or, at least, the version of it which the author presents to us as reality), there's also much that goes on within dreams, and within dreams that are themselves within dreams, and so on -- to the extent that it can be hard on occasion for the reader (or at least this reader) to work out which layer of derived reality is the one currently involved. This is the aspect of Berry's novel that I liked.

In a way the novel's like an expanded account of a dream; while the phantasmagoric nature of the events sometimes captivated me, there were also quite a few occasions when it occurred to me that there's a very good reason why people are generally discouraged from telling others about their dreams. It also means that throughout the text there's the sense that nothing that goes on, are the people participating, are of any consequence; there's no passion in the writing, and cannot be, with the result that it's pretty hard to muster any passion for the reading, either. By the halfway mark I was finding proceedings tedious (I was also finding it hard to remember, each time I picked the book up, what had been happening when I'd broken of); by three-quarters of the way through I was, alas, beginning to keep count of the pages left to go.

This alienation from the events of the text is unfortunately bolstered by the book's other major influence (if I can use that term loosely): surrealism, most especially the surrealism of Rene Magritte -- just to make sure we catch this, the title page bears a Magritte-style hat! It crossed my mind at one point that this book might be an exercise along the lines of "the detective novel Magritte might have written"; while I dismissed the notion immediately, it nevertheless did capture something of the feel of the text. The trouble is that the great delight of Magritte's paintings is that they portray a world that by definition we can't enter -- they're windows onto a dreamlike place of beautiful, consciousness-enflaming fantastication. If you're asked to step through the window and into that world, much of its magic ebbs because of your presence -- especially if your presence is prolonged to fill 278 pages.

I'd been looking forward acutely to The Manual of Detection -- it sounded to be right up my street (and the book's excellent, imaginative design enhanced this expectation) -- and must confess to being very disappointed. I was impressed by much in it, not least the author's first-rate imagination, and I'll be looking out for further books by Berry; but this one just didn't do it for me.


The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger

Ever since her childhood, Clare has been visited intermittently by Henry, a man from the relatively near future who, because of a genetic abnormality, suffers from a condition called Chrono-Displacement Disorder -- every now and then he involuntarily travels through time, mainly from his present into his past, often drawn back to events that have been of profound emotional significance to him. Visiting the child, then adolescent, then adult Clare, Henry is aware that this is his future much-beloved wife, something he dare not tell her until eventually, when she's in her early 20s and he's in his late 20s, she meets him in what is, for the first time, the present day for both of them -- at which point, of course, although the Burne-Jonesish artist Clare knows who the handsome young librarian is, he has never met her before. The novel tells the tale of their romancing and their life together, the chronology of the telling being as haphazard as Henry's experience of living -- a narrative strategy that's surprisingly effective.

This is a very long novel, but it reads easily. By the end, though, I found there was a sort of buildup in my mind of lots of small things that bothered me. I kept waiting for the moment when there'd be some sort of handwavium explanation of Chrono-Displacement Disorder beyond that it was, um, genetic, yes, genetic, you see; that moment never arrived, and I still don't really understand how a genetic abnormality could conceivably cause a person to lose their grip on a coherent timeline. (I did, though, like the notion, expressed briefly somewhere, that Henry might be the precursor of Hom. sap.'s next evolutionary leap -- but this idea was then seemingly forgotten . . . perhaps because its ramifications might prove too onerous for the novelist? After all, if future generations were likely to be hopping uncontrollably all over the timeline, the Now should be full of them.) Although I enjoyed the scattershot mode of telling, every now and then there seemed to be a hiccup in it that could be glossed over only by an illogicality. For example, when Henry and Clare are trying to have a baby (not easy when it's likely the fetus will Chrono-Displacement Disorder its way out of the womb and then back again, causing extensive damage to Clare's innards), a Future Henry turns up at one point to reassure Clare that they'll eventually be successful. Why doesn't Future Henry tell Now Henry? For that matter, why doesn't Clare tell Now Henry? Well, because either obvious action would preclude a piece of plot where Now Henry has a vasectomy rather than risk his beloved's life by impregnating her, but Clare gets pregnant anyway because a Past Henry obligingly turns up to do the honours.

Although there's hardly anything by way of graphic description, sex is a central concern of this book. As soon as Clare turns 18, the pair of them go at it like bunnies; and this habit persists through their more orthodox meeting and into their married life. This gives the book as a whole a definite erotic charge, yet eventually I grew impatient with what seemed an imbalance: I seemed to know more about the couple's sex life than I did about all the other aspects of their life combined -- as if they were two-dimensional except in their carnal relationship. I became aware particularly of this growing dissatisfaction when their daughter Alba began to make appearances in the narrative: here at last was an actual character, one whose presence seemed palpable. So why had none of the other supporting cast leapt from the pages in the same way? Most importantly, why, after several hundred pages, were Henry and Clare -- except when they were boffing, getting ready to boff or enjoying post-boff moments -- still less real to me than their child? I remain unsure of the answer, but I think it might be because Niffenegger focused so much of her effort on making them exist as lovers that the rest of their lives just got sort of filled in, as if by numbers.

I've been guilty of something of the same here, concentrating at length on dissatisfactions and not saying a whole lot about the fact that, taken all in all, The Time Traveler's Wife is a pretty good read -- an enjoyable diversion.


A Shortcut in Time (2003) by Charles Dickinson

As children in Euclid Heights, Illinois, Josh and Flo were brought together when a local thug, the sheriff's son, killed Flo's brother and caused Josh's brother profound mental damage. Now they're married, still in Euclid Heights, and with a daughter of their own; Josh is an unsuccessful artist while Flo, a moderately successful pediatrician, keeps the family's economic boat afloat.

One day Josh, out cycling, has an encounter with time travel: a vicious dog that was chasing him suddenly disappears and is soon after re-encountered, seemingly having slipped a few minutes into the future. A while later, Josh himself experiences minor time travel. He attributes these dislocations of the timeline to the curious layout of Euclid Heights, to the town's geometry; as well as the ordinary grid of streets, there are so-called perp walks cutting across, and it's while traveling along these perp walks that temporal hiccups seem to occur. And not necessarily just hiccups: into the town comes an adolescent girl, Constance, who seems to have inadvertently made the trip to the present from the early 20th century. Since Josh is now notorious throughout town for his claims about time travel, it's inevitable these two will drift together -- not in any romantic sense, but simply in that Josh feels a solution to Constance's problem will give him some kind of clue to his own.

And in a way that's what happens; she returns to her own time, where she carves out a short and not very happy existence for herself. However, Josh's daughter Penny is likewise sucked back into the past; he succeeds in following her but, on his return to the present, he discovers that much has changed: now he isn't married to Flo but instead to a woman called Lee, and they are living in happy poverty as tenants of Josh's brother, who in this timeline was not brain-damaged by the bully. After a certain amount of mental conniption, Josh seems to accept this new order.

I loved all but the last few pages of this book. The writing is often very lovely. Not only are the characters fully three-dimensional, so are the relationships between them; particularly impressive was the depiction of the relationship between Josh and Flo, which he thinks is a perfectly happy and healthy one all the while we, the readers, can see this is far from the case -- his fairly ready acclimatization to marriage to a different woman is not as implausible as the bald data might make it seem. Also pleasing is that Josh is by no means the excellent fellow he believes himself to be; one of the contributory reasons for his poor relationship with Flo is that he actually is a bit of a wastrel, a would-be artist who would rather keep on tinkering than face the fact that his talent is slight and he should think about doing something more productive.

So what of those last few pages? Well, it's as if the book had a final chapter that was accidentally left out. We're told that even in this world Josh's brother has some kind of recurring problem, but never do we find out what that problem is. When Penny returns from the past to find herself living in a different Now from the one she left, there's a clumsy attempt to tie everything off in a sentence or two and then the book suddenly ends. Will Penny accept the new status quo and settle down with her father and Lee, or will she try to get back to her original family in the parallel timeline? Who knows? -- any explanation is in that hypothetical missing chapter. When I got to the book's final page, my jaw dropped; I went back a few pages and reread them, in case I'd been stupid and missed something; but seemingly not. Very strange -- especially since all the rest of the book is so very, very good.


The Enormous Hourglass (1976) by Ron Goulart

Sam Brimmer is a P.I. specializing in cases involving time travel, an activity governed by the Time Travel Overseeing Committee. Together with his time machine -- which takes the form of a robot/android called Tempo-203 -- and his sidekick Sanchez, Brimmer investigates the abduction of a modern babe back to 1933's Hollywood, and in so doing uncovers a massive plot to give criminal bosses safe haven in the past and to supply the Nazis with modern weapons so they can win World War II. The Big Hourglass of the title is the illicit time machine, its activities invisible to the detectors of the TTOC, that's being used to effect all this.

This is fairly standard Goulart fare: a somewhat shambolic plot, cranky malfunctioning robots, plenty of excellent one-liners, deliciously skewed logic all over the place. It also makes (page 33) a very perceptive point about the psychological side-effects time travel might have:

As a matter of fact, I don't even enjoy time travel much at all. Whenever I go back more than a hundred years or so I get a very spooky feeling. I keep thinking how everyone I meet, with the exception of a few stray time travelers, is actually dead.

ChronoSpace (2001) by Allen Steele

Based on a multiple award-winning short story which I haven't read (". . . Where Angels Fear to Tread"), this novel takes a hard-sf approach to time travel. Some centuries in the future, the Chronospace Research Centre runs carefully monitored historical field trips to important moments of the past to find out exactly what went on. One of these is to the Hindenburg disaster of 1937 . . . except that in the event the chrononauts inadvertently make some tiny but significant alteration in the proceedings: the bomb planted by an anti-Hitler terrorist (for the sake of plot, the novel subscribes to the conspiracy theory) detonates some while after the passengers have disembarked, rather than while the airship is still mooring. This trivial divergence is enough to alter the course of subsequent history.

In parallel with the narrative about the chrononauts, we're told about events occurring to NASA scientist David Murphy, who has earned the ire of his bosses by publishing a Science FACT article in Analog endorsing the notion that UFOs could be timeships from the future. As he makes his way home from the office, he finds his footsteps being dogged by a scruffy older man whom he sort of vaguely recognizes . . . and you're never going to guess who it might be, are you?

Once the chrononauts, post-Hindenburg non-disaster, start trying to make their way home, we move with a jolt (this is very effectively handled) into Murphy's altered timeline: now he's working for the Office of Paranormal Sciences, a government body set up by the same dimwitted Congress that, a while back, killed off NASA because its work was irrelevant. As an OPS "scientist", Murphy is one of the team sent to examine the appearance of a UFO in remote countryside. Needless to say, this is the timeship of our chrononauts, one of whom Murphy runs into. His conviction that this character is from the future leads him to take a pivotal role in the development of the world's very first time machine. (Later he'll discover that, in his original timeline, his Analog article and a later sf novel he wrote inspired his son to do the basic research that gave birth to time travel.)

In due course the chrononauts team up with both the Murphys -- the young one from one timeline and the much older one from the other -- but not before they discover that the future for the world if time traveling continues is doom: an ancient alien species, policing the galaxy precisely to make sure the practice never arises, blow the moon to smithereens and thereby render the earth uninhabitable. This is because (pages 264-5)

Apparently, time travel is the most dangerous thing an intelligent race can discover, because a civilization capablke of exploring its own history is likewise capable of changing it. When that happens, more often than not they destroy themselves . . . and sometimes they take other races with them.

It therefore becomes imperative that Murphy neither does the science himself nor publishes the writings that will encourage his son to do it -- better, in fact, that he lose himself somewhere in history. For the chrononauts the challenge is somewhat similar: without the invention of time travel, the future from which they came does not exist.

The book's title (sans Spielbergish capitalization) refers to Steele's mechanism for time travel. The medium of chronospace can be thought of as akin to hyperspace, only with the wormholes extending through time rather than through space. (Yes, I know, hyperspatial wormholes would have a time aspect too; but that's not relevant to this novel.) Here's a description of the timeship Oberon making an entry into chronospace (pages 144-5):

Oberon's AI discovered a quantum irregularity in Earth's gravity well; exotic matter contained within the pods beneath the saucer enlarged the subatomic rift into a funnel large enough for the timeship to pass through, and laced the funnel's mouth with energy fields that would keep the wormhole temporarily stable. Within moments, a small area of spacetime was warped into something that resembled a four-dimensional ram's horn: a closed time-like circle. Relentlessly attracted by the wormhole it had just created, the timeship plummeted into the closed-time circle.

It's a neat piece of verisimilitudinal hokey science -- certainly good enough to convince me!

ChronoSpace is a very ingenious item, but I have to confess I found the writing a bit pedestrian; matters aren't helped by the countless proofing errors. One puzzling glitch is that the name of veteran sf author Cleve Cartmill is spelled incorrectly throughout ("Cartmell"). What grated also was the sort of sf and sf fandom orientation of a lot of the book. I was told more than I needed to know about the content of classic issues of Analog -- treated as a well known magazine even though perhaps 99% of the population will never have heard of it. When Greg Benford made an appearance (sort of) as a minor but significant character in the tale I winced at what seemed like a sort of in-joke without the joke. And so on. In a way I suppose it's reasonable to direct an sf novel so especially toward sf fandom -- to people who're dedicated readers of the genre -- but my own preference is for narratives that (with obvious qualifications) are accessible to the rest of the fiction-reading public. If you mind none of these things, then I'm sure you'll love ChronoSpace; even if you do, it's still well worth reading.


The Mists of Time (1984) by Margaret J. Anderson

I'd thought this was the first volume of a trilogy of YA time-travel novels; when it arrived, I discovered it was the third. Damn. Earlier vols are now on order from my long-suffering library . . .

After a collapse of civilization because of climate change, a gentle tribe makes their way from fiery southern zones to settle in what was once the west of Scotland. Now, in AD2179, the girl Lara Avara must establish herself in a world newly rent by an invasion of the Barbaric Ones, who carry much of the tribe -- Lara Avara not included -- off to slavery somewhere further south on the British mainland. The tribe has long held a nearby stone circle in reverence; and it proves that, buried underground where it looks as if there are stones missing from the ring, there are menhirs that have the special property, when handled by sensitives, of opening up time portals -- either for viewing or even for travel. Through such a portal into Lara Avara's time come a pair of 20th-century children, Jennifer and Robert, who bring their own further complications to the future world. All is eventually resolved, of course.

This is a very nicely written book, and I much enjoyed reading it. (I was puzzled, though, by how Robert's and Jennifer's speech was instantly comprehensible by the 22nd-century folk while the speech of the Barbaric Ones was just so much gibberish to them. Surely the two modern dialects would have been closer to each other than to one separated from them by a gulf of 200 years?)

No real mechanism for time travel is offered beyond that it's Yer Mystic. However, there's an interesting notion which, although eventually it's cast aside, shouldn't go unmentioned. Robert is a farmer's son, and his dad is making him follow in the family profession even though the youth really wants to be a painter, and is good at it. A solution to his dilemma is offered: one Robert could remain here in the future, complete with artistic ability and zeal; while another could exist in the 20th century stripped of all painterly yearnings. I can't remember having come across this idea before -- that time travel could be used to allow individuals to fulfil two separate life-plans, as it were. As I say, Anderson discards the concept soon enough, possibly because it'd have brought unwanted complications into her tale; the right decision, but on the other hand a pity.

I'm looking forward to reading the other titles in the series.

Comments

[quietselkie.livejournal.com]

I couldn't do the Roy book, despite its recommendation from a friend whose book choices for me I usually trust.

I'd had Codex on the maybe shelf, but it sounds like I can pass on that. I am still intrigued by the Magicians book. What can I say, I still want more, after Harry Potter.

Niffenegger is still on the TBR for someday.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I couldn't do the Roy book

Yeah: for the first quite a lot of pages I felt I was dutifully working at it rather than, ya know, reading it. After that I got quite into the swing of things. Even so, in the later stages I had deliberately to devote a couple of hours to finishing the thing, as otherwise my reading of it could have dribbled on for days.

I'd had Codex on the maybe shelf, but it sounds like I can pass on that.

That would be my advice.

What can I say, I still want more, after Harry Potter.

He is too young for you, M. There are plenty of other fish in the fryer.