Emily St. John Mandel does it again! Station Eleven was one of my favorites a few years back and this one is pretty close to it. I love science fictioEmily St. John Mandel does it again! Station Eleven was one of my favorites a few years back and this one is pretty close to it. I love science fiction and I really love a good time travel plot, and Sea of Tranquility does the job nicely, with intricate plotting. It has a deeper plot and a more lyrical than usual style of writing than most books I read (at least in the SF genre). And just a dash of Matrix in the plot along with the bouncing back and forth in time.
It made my brain work a little harder than usual, had some thought-provoking insights into life and human nature, and it's only about 250 pages, which is something I've come to appreciate greatly in this era of overblown epics.
3.5 stars for this final book in the Aurora Cycle SF trilogy. Full review, first posted on FantasyLiterature.com:
Aurora’s End begins and finishes with3.5 stars for this final book in the Aurora Cycle SF trilogy. Full review, first posted on FantasyLiterature.com:
Aurora’s End begins and finishes with a bang — literally, lots of them — and sandwiches all kinds of wild events in between. (Note: this review includes some spoilers for the prior books in this series.)
When we left Squad 312, a group of young adult space academy grads trying to save the galaxy, at the end of book #2, Aurora Burning, they were split into three groups, ALL of them on the verge of being murdered in one way or another. As I commented in my review of Aurora Burning, “Kaufman and Kristoff must have worked really hard to come up with a cliffhanger of that scope and magnitude.” They’re either on the verge of being blown up by space missiles or being assaulted by Caersan, the psychopathic leader of a warrior clan whose warmongering Squad 312 has been trying to foil.
Caersan has a spaceship armed with incredibly powerful alien technology that was supposed to be used to stop the evil Ra’haam, an alien species that is trying to assimilate everyone in the galaxy into their hive mind. It’s kind of a Borg-like group, except they use plant spores to assimilate people instead of technology. But instead of using the ship’s weapon to kill the Ra’haam’s planets, as intended by the ship’s makers, Caersan is using it to kill the stars and planets where his enemies live and generally terrorize the galaxy.
Spoiler alert: no one in Squad 312 dies (well, at least not permanently) as those cliffhangers from Aurora Burning are worked out in the initial chapters of this book. But three of our heroes get zapped a couple of hundred years into the past, where they get trapped in a destructive time loop with a hostile space pilot. Two others in the group (along with Caersan and his weapon ship) get bounced a few decades into the future, when the Ra’haam has nearly completed its goal of assimilating all the races in the galaxy that it can and wiping out the rest. Meanwhile, in the present, the group’s leader Tyler has hooked up with Saedii, the warrior daughter of Caersan who is nearly as scary and deadly as her father, and is working overtime to convince her and her crew to let him try to prevent the Ra’haam from blowing up a conclave where the leaders of all spacefaring races in the galaxy are gathering.
The pace of Aurora’s End is very quick, almost frantic at times, and it kept me glued to my chair for an entire evening and well into the night. The writing style is breezy and the humor snarky. It’s an exciting roller coaster ride of a read, though events push the boundaries of believability. In particular, I couldn’t really buy the somewhat simplistic way the massive conflict with the Ra’haam was ultimately resolved. Since that’s the primary conflict driving this entire series, that dissatisfaction was a problem for me with this concluding book.
But all in all it’s a pretty well put-together space trilogy. The plot is satisfyingly complex, especially once the time travel element is introduced. Several of the main characters have unusual backstories, enough that they’re not cardboard cutouts. They’re also a diverse crew; though most of the diversity arises from the fact that they’re from different planets, there are some characters with different sexual orientations.
If you’re looking for a fun YA science fiction series with adventure, humor and romance, I’d recommend the Aurora Cycle.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!...more
What’s a grumpy, misanthropic time traveling warrior to do? Governments and factions have misused time travel machines, each using their time machines to remake the past in the way they want it to be, over and over again. Time travel machines really are the ultimate weapon: if you go back far enough you can change history enough that your enemy never has a chance. Except that your enemy’s time traveling agents are cut off from those changes, so they’re still around to try to change history in a different way that favors them. And then there are Causality Bombs, “[f]or when regular time travel just can’t mess up continuity enough.” Now the past is irretrievably broken into shards and splinters.
So our surly main character, the last survivor of the time soldiers, has set himself up as a gatekeeper in a distant future to make sure it never happens again past his point in time. His tech allows him to pull all time travelers heading to the far future to stop in his particular place and time, where he can make sure they never go any further. And when that involves murdering said time travelers — he keeps guns, poisons and a feathery Allosaurus named Miffly just for this purpose (“she is ridiculously adorable when she’s not actually eating people”) — well, that’s just the way it goes. Until one day, when he gets an unpleasant surprise … from his future. Maybe, though, with the help of Miffly, he can solve this latest problem too.
One Day All This Will Be Yours, a new SF novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky, is wildly intelligent and imaginative, narrated by the main character with lots of irreverent and extremely black humor. You have to be able to enjoy a protagonist who, with no discernable regret, offs any number of innocent people in pursuit of what he views as the greater cause. One of the highlights is when he and a time-traveling antagonist engage in a battle in which each of them has pulled together an army of the worst villains they can find throughout human history: Stalin, multiple versions of Jack the Ripper, Elizabeth Báthory, Vlad the Impaler, Ching Shih, and many, many more.
In the end there is only one of them left, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Hitler. Basically because he’s been hiding in a bunker all this time. He pokes his head up, and I set Miffly on him. … It’s very therapeutic. And the thing about allosaurs is they can run really quite fast, and the thing about Hitlers is that they can’t, not really, or not for very long.
Tchaikovsky’s concept of time and causality being broken is uniquely executed here in One Day All This Will Be Yours. Our main character makes the most of his access to the past, both for pleasure and to enforce his idea of keeping the far future pristine. Of course, time travel fiction is replete with paradoxes, and everything here isn’t entirely logical — at least, my brain couldn’t quite wrap itself fully around this novella’s concept of time — but Tchaikovsky commits to it completely and pulls you along with him, immersing you in this fascinating and slightly loopy world until you really don’t care any more if it doesn’t altogether make sense.
My only qualm with One Day All This Will Be Yours is that its ending is remarkably abrupt, with reams of hanging threads and no real attempt at a wrap-up. I don’t think I fully get what Tchaikovsky was going for with that ending, other than (view spoiler)[that it certainly gives a “well, here we go again” type of impression (hide spoiler)], but even after a couple of rereads I’m still not a fan of it. As a whole, though, this novella is so very funny, creative and intelligent that I have to give it my strongest recommendation … at least if you’re a fan of dark, flippant humor.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!...more
4.5 stars - my favorite of the 1944 stories nominated for Retro Hugo awards! You can read "Arena" free online here or here. Review first posted on Fan4.5 stars - my favorite of the 1944 stories nominated for Retro Hugo awards! You can read "Arena" free online here or here. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature, together with reviews for ALL of the current Retro Hugo novelette and short story nominees. Seriously, this FanLit column took me HOURS to put together, even though I didn't write all of the reviews in it, so please scoot over there and take a quick look and let me know if my efforts paid off. Feel free to add a comment to the thread there. :)
So, "Arena":
Two huge space fleets near Pluto are about to engage in a battle to the death: Humans and the aliens they call the Outsiders. Bob Carson, a young human in an individual scout ship, is about to engage with his Outsider counterpart in another scouter when he suddenly blacks out, only to awaken under a dome on a planet in another dimension. Across from him is a large red ball with retractable tentacles that turns out to be the Outsider scout, and the two are separated by an invisible barrier.
A disembodied voice informs Carson that if the space battle ensues, one side will be wholly exterminated, but that “winner” will be so damaged that it will “retrogress and never fulfill its destiny, but decay and return to mindless dust.” So this powerful entity has plucked Carson and the Outsider out of the two fleets to fight a one-on-one duel to the death. This being will destroy the entire spacefleet of the loser, allowing the winning species to continue to progress. But given the invisible barrier between the two, it will be a battle of brains as much as physical strength.
I first came across "Arena" at about age 13 in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964, a book that was instrumental in shaping my love and tastes for SF. "Arena" was one of the most compelling and memorable stories in the collection, and rereading it now, a few decades later, I’m impressed with how well this novelette has withstood the test of time. Compared to some of the other Retro Hugo nominees from this year, it’s an outstanding piece of storytelling, and there’s a nice note of irony to the ending.
"Arena" was used at least partially as inspiration for a famous Star Trek episode in 1967 (also called Arena), which has a quite different ending. Many prefer the Star Trek ending, and I can't really argue with that, but considering that this was written during WWII, when the mood for righteous war was at its peak, it’s impressive that Brown actually took the time to show that Carson does attempt to make peace with the Outsider, which responds with a wave of hatred so strong that it physically weakens him.
"Arena" may be somewhat lacking in depth and nuance, but as a suspenseful, well-told SF action tale from this era, it’s hard to beat....more
4.5 stars. This clever SF novella is just my brand of literary crack. Climate change, time travel paradoxes, shifting reality, the past affecting the 4.5 stars. This clever SF novella is just my brand of literary crack. Climate change, time travel paradoxes, shifting reality, the past affecting the future and vice versa — it’s all here. A 71 year old Russian widow is the main character, and she’s GREAT. And the plot is intricate but actually makes logical sense through all of it, and I am HERE for that.
Time travel to ... the late 1970s? It's actually pretty good. This is a review for "A Time to Reap," nominated for a Locus award. My review was first Time travel to ... the late 1970s? It's actually pretty good. This is a review for "A Time to Reap," nominated for a Locus award. My review was first posted on Fantasy Literature. This novella is free online here at Uncanny magazine.
In this time-travel novella, Kitty Whelan, a petite 16-year-old actress in the year 2028, is playing the part of 12-year-old Sissy in the play Time to Reap, based on a real-life series of unsolved murders that took place in 1978 at the Abbott family reunion. The cast, along with a few reporters, takes an excursion to the Massachusetts farm where the reunion and murders occurred fifty years earlier. When Kitty sneaks off to the barn, she’s yanked back in time to 1978, before the murders have occurred. She meets Margaret Abbott, inadvertent inventor of a time machine … who Kitty knows will be the first victim of the murderer.
Kitty quickly convinces Margaret that she’s from the future (she doesn’t mention the pending murders) and Margaret introduces Kitty to the clan as her great-niece. As Kitty meets Sissy, who will also be one of the murder victims, and gets to know various members of the Abbott clan, she dithers about time paradoxes, changing the past and whether to say anything to the people she’s befriending. She also becomes aware of some of the undercurrents and tensions among the Abbotts … and she may herself be in danger from the murderer.
Kitty has her own issues to deal with, mostly arising out of her stage mother’s controlling behavior and diet demands on Kitty, that add some nuance to this story. It’s fun to see the past through Kitty’s eyes, especially where the play she’s been rehearsing diverges from reality, and her surprise at some of the things (like children traveling alone) that people took for granted in the 1970s.
Meeting one Abbott after another … I realized what made them such a weird-looking family. What had been bothering me on the way up the stairs.
Every last one of them was white. The whole family.
The past really is a different country.
The story loses some steam toward the end as the plot — and the treatment of time travel and multiple timelines — get a little muddled. The ending raises some interesting ideas, though, and I overall I enjoyed A Time to Reap....more
Nebula Award novelette nominee "The Archronology of Love" by Caroline M. Yoachim is in this issue of Lightspeed magazine, free online here: http://wwwNebula Award novelette nominee "The Archronology of Love" by Caroline M. Yoachim is in this issue of Lightspeed magazine, free online here: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fic... (At least for now this review is only for this novelette.) Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Saki Jones is in space, above a colony planet called New Mars, where the ruins of an alien civilization were being researched by the colonists. Her “lifelove” partner M.J. had gone ahead of Saki and their grown son Kenzou to help establish the colony. Saki emerged from stasis when their ship arrived at New Mars to find that M.J. and all of the other colonists are dead, apparently of some alien plague. Saki and her crewmates are driven to find out more about what killed the colonists.
To do that they turn to “archronology,” the study of the past through a type of time record, called the Chronicle. It’s a limited type of time travel, enabling you to visit places in the past to view what happened there at a particular time. But the inherent limits of archronology are significant: wherever a person moves in their view of a particular scene from the past, trails of cloudy white permanently blur the original scene.
Layer upon layer of time, a stratified record of the universe. When you visit the Chronicle, you alter it. Your presence muddles the temporal record as surely as an archaeological dig muddles the dirt at an excavation site.
“The Archronology of Love” raises questions of perception and biases in conducting scientific research, how love and personal connections can drive our decision-making. Intellectually Saki realizes that she should step aside from entering the Chronicle because of her strong emotional attachment to M.J., but she comes up with multiple reasons for not doing so. This story also explores the difficulty of understanding an alien culture (from both sides). Yoachim envisions the Chronicle in a way that is believable, creating an interesting twist on standard time travel stories. Saki’s character is also well-developed (if not so much the secondary characters), pulling the reader into Saki’s personal pain and professional dilemmas....more
Final review, co-written with Kat, and first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Dispel Illusion is the final book in Mark Lawrence’s IMPOSSIBLE TIMES trilogFinal review, co-written with Kat, and first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Dispel Illusion is the final book in Mark Lawrence’s IMPOSSIBLE TIMES trilogy. (Readers will need to finish One Word Kill and Limited Wish before beginning Dispel Illusion, so we’ll assume you’ve done that.) Kindly, Mark Lawrence provides a recap of previous important events at the beginning of this book. (Thank you, Mr. Lawrence!) Then the story begins, literally, with an explosion. It’s a singular explosion, though: time itself is exploding in their lab, affecting various things in different ways. Dangerously sharp metal shards hang in the air and slowly creep outward, while Nick and other people in the lab are moving on a far faster internal clock. This isn’t as helpful as it might seem; Nick observes that the “air doesn’t want to get out of your way … running at 300 miles an hour is just as hard as standing still in a super-tornado with 300-mile-an-hour winds trying to knock you down.”
At this point in the story, it’s 1992 and Nick is 22 years old. He’s at Cambridge, working on inventing time travel. He knows he has to accomplish this by 2011, the year that he was visited by his future self when he was a teen in One Word Kill. Nick dreads the accident that will inspire his 40-year-old self to go back in time to safeguard Mia’s memories. He also knows that when he goes back to the 1980s, he will die. So at the same time that Nick is inventing time travel and setting events in motion to be able to travel back to 1986 if necessary to save Mia’s memories, he’s also doing his best to help Mia avoid her near-fatal accident in 2011. Those efforts are complicated by the re-emergence of their old nemesis Charles Rust. Rust’s job with Miles Guilder, the unscrupulous business tycoon who has been financing Nick’s time travel research for years for his own reasons, put Nick and Charles at odds once again.
The timeline in Dispel Illusion shifts back and forth between 1992 and 2011, with a few stops along the way in other time periods. Guilder introduces a game-changer when he brings Nick and his girlfriend Mia to a hidden cave that Guilder has discovered, where a shocking, tangible evidence of time travel has been found.
Dispel Illusion is fun. We like Nick and his friends, who are still playing the same game of Dungeons & Dragons that they were playing six years ago. Throughout the trilogy, their D&D game, in which they use spells called Power Word Kill, Limited Wish, and Dispel Illusion, has subtly paralleled the events happening in Nick’s life.
To his credit, Mark Lawrence pays more attention than most authors to the scientific problems and paradoxes that time travel causes, including the complication of the Earth traveling through space. One of the more intriguing complications that Nick and his fellow researchers face is an experiment that causes a time loop. Nick’s handsome, somewhat superficial friend John is forced to rise to the occasion, which leads to an amusing joke referencing the film Groundhog Day. The visible evidence of someone traveling forwards or backwards in time was a unique twist to standard time travel lore. And as Nick and Mia eventually turn time travel into a highly secret enterprise, the psychological motives of the time travelers and the mental effects on Nick were intriguing as well.
I was no longer the Nick Hayes who first met Demus a few streets from Simon’s mum’s house. I had left that boy behind in my wake, just as we all abandon the children we were. Slow or fast, the years pull us apart from them, sometimes in one savage yank, sometimes by degrees, like the hour hand of the clock, too stealthy for us to perceive its motion and yet when you look again it is no longer where you left it. That night I looked in the mirror, not wanting to meet my own gaze, and it was Demus who looked back at me and smiled a bitter little smile.
In our review of Limited Wish, we said, “We are wondering what illusions will be dispelled…” and, indeed, Lawrence pulls the curtain aside and gives us several surprises. The climactic scene sheds a new and unexpected light on some prior events. But in that review we also said, “we’re simply not convinced that the first instance of time-travel, the one that created all these problems for Nick and his friends, ever needed to happen in the first place. So far, the suffering and confusion that has resulted doesn’t seem worth it.”
Unfortunately, we have to report that we are still not convinced. It’s been a while since we read the first two books, so it’s possible that there are facts we’re missing or misremembering, but it seems like there was a much simpler way for adult Nick in 2011 to attempt to save Mia’s life. (view spoiler)[ Why didn’t he just go back far enough to avoid the car accident that damaged Mia’s brain? It seems like that would have been a lot easier and would have avoided all the paradoxes. And though in the end the price paid in pain and loss of life for Demus’s trip to the past was not what it initially seemed to be, Nick/Demus had no knowledge of that when he made the choice to pursue that course, so our point about his motivation being insufficient still stands. (hide spoiler)] And, while we’re discussing this, we’re also not convinced that (view spoiler)[ the truth about Elton’s dad had to be hidden from Nick. Why bother to stage the death if their memories were going to be wiped after? They had their memories wiped twice: once after young Mia notices the wires and they decide to stage it, and then again later. It seems like there must have been another way that didn’t involve losing Elton’s friendship for 25 years. (hide spoiler)]
A few other nitpicks: Lawrence keeps telling us that when Nick goes back in time, he has to do everything exactly like he remembers or it will cause a branch in the timeline. But the human memory is remarkably fallible and there’s no way that Nick remembers every event and conversation (or even most events and conversations) accurately. The text suggests that when Nick doesn’t remember the exact words he tends to naturally say the same thing he said before, but that seems a bit of a stretch. Maybe it doesn’t matter as long as Nick’s memories match, but what about the memories of all the other people involved?
It is possible that we misremember, misunderstood, or simply missed the answers to our questions. If so, we apologize. But even with its flaws, we enjoyed the IMPOSSIBLE TIMES trilogy. Nick and his friends are appealing and it’s easy to sympathize with their plights. The story is fun and after much tension it ends satisfactorily. Who cares that we didn’t always believe it?
Dispel Illusion contains a thoughtful treatment of time travel, moments of brilliance, and the running Dungeons & Dragons subplot supplying several metaphors for the main plot and for life generally. And more (to paraphrase The Princess Bride): Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Friendship. Strong hate. True love. It’s a fitting end to this time travel saga.
I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley. Thank you!
In which stealing ideas for technological inventions from the future turns out to have some problematic side effects.
In turn-of-the-century Europe, EIn which stealing ideas for technological inventions from the future turns out to have some problematic side effects.
In turn-of-the-century Europe, England and its allies are trying to find ways to combat the evil Mongolian Wizard. Since they can't (or won't) beat him at wizard-making, maybe technology will work. And someone has figured out a way to use psychically-gifted people to get ideas and blueprints from the future. Is the murder that Ritter and his wolf are investigating related to this?
The plot, which deals with both the murder investigation and time paradoxes, got a little muddled here. Possibly that was the point, though.
Part of Michael Swanwick's Mongolian Wizard series of short stories, all of which are free online at Tor.com. Definitely read the first story, The Mongolian Wizard, first, but the later stories are somewhat interchangeable....more
3.5 stars for this 1947 children's fantasy. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
In Bonfires and Broomsticks, part two of Mary Norton’s Bedknobs 3.5 stars for this 1947 children's fantasy. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
In Bonfires and Broomsticks, part two of Mary Norton’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks duology, it’s two years after events of the first book, The Magic Bed-Knob. The three young siblings, Carey, Charles and Paul, get the chance to leave London and spend the summer in Bedfordshire with their spinster friend, Miss Price, who was a witch in training. And they still have the magic bed-knob that enables them to fly through time and space on Paul’s old bed, which is now in Miss Price’s bedroom! Good magical times ahead!
Or maybe not: Miss Price, while pleased to see them, has decided that being a witch is a Bad Idea, and she’s given up magic. But, the children argue, almost anything is fine in moderation, and they never did get the chance to try the time-traveling aspect of the bed-knob. Maybe just one little trip into the past? It is rather tempting, Miss Price agrees …
Meanwhile, in London in late August, 1666, a 35-year-old, nervous necromancer named Emelius Jones has just taken over the magical practice of his old mentor, who told Emelius on his deathbed that there really was no magic involved in what they do; it’s just fooling people. But then three strangely-dressed (but polite!) children show up on Emelius’s doorstep.
Bonfires and Broomsticks is another charming, old-fashioned magical adventure, this one focused on time travel. The plot didn’t go at all in the direction I expected. For example, when the children first meet Emelius and find out what date it is, Carey brightly comments that the Fire of London will occur in a week’s time (you have to admire her outstanding memory for historical dates). One might be forgiven for thinking that a suspenseful and dangerous scene involving the children escaping death in the fire is in the cards, but Norton has something quite different in mind, though it does relate to the London fire.
Bonfires and Broomsticks has even less connection to the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks than The Magic Bed-Knob does, aside from having a plot element involving a magical spell called “intrasubstantiary locomotion” (called “substitutiary locomotion” in the film). But the plot is entirely different, and should be enjoyed on its own merits. It’s definitely worth checking out if you liked the first book, and the pair is available on Kindle for just $4.99. Both are early middle-grade level reading....more
More time travel craziness mixed with a little less D&D and a little more paradox. Final review (a joint review with Kat Hooper at FanLit) first posteMore time travel craziness mixed with a little less D&D and a little more paradox. Final review (a joint review with Kat Hooper at FanLit) first posted on Fantasy Literature:
As Limited Wish begins, Nick Hayes, the 16-year-old math genius that we met in One Word Kill (you need to read it first) is being pursued by a pack of drunken Cambridge students bent on beating him up. It’s 1986 and Nick has just been enrolled at Cambridge, thanks to the notice of Professor Halligan, a brilliant mathematician who recognizes Nick’s potential. What Prof Halligan doesn’t know is that Nick has to invent time travel so that when he’s older he can come visit his teenage self in the late 1980s and, in so doing, save Mia, the girl he thinks he loves and has a future with.
But there are several major problems with this scenario. Worst: (1) Nick has no idea how the mathematics of time travel might work, especially when you throw in the time paradoxes he’s experiencing, and (2) Mia has dumped Nick. Other significant problems include the hazing that Nick is undergoing at Cambridge, the weird instances where he seems to perceive time fragmenting to create multiple potential futures, the fact that he’s met another girl, Helen, who he’s very much attracted to, and some dire news he receives from his oncologist. At this point, Nick is fairly confused and realizing that he may have screwed up his future entirely. He needs to get it back on track if he hopes to survive to save himself and Mia.
Some visitors from the future ― one familiar character and one new one, Eva, who has a surprising connection to Nick ― complicate this process further, especially since they’re from incompatible futures. If that’s not bad enough, another vicious enemy appears who’s tasked by a shadowy investor with keeping Nick on task with his scientific research, and who begins to take an unhealthy interest in Nick because of certain events from One Word Kill. And have we mentioned that the universe is trying to kill Nick? (It’s nothing personal, Eva assures Nick, “just physics.”)
Mark Lawrence’s IMPOSSIBLE TIMES trilogy is reminiscent of (and possibly a celebration of?) 1985’s best movie, Back to the Future. It’s full of time paradoxes and competing versions of the past, present and future that shouldn’t be examined too closely; you’ve just got to deal with it. The number of hard-to-swallow coincidences, like a second villainous Rust brother, and the overload of problems and challenges faced by Nick, are hand-waved away as all part of Nick becoming a lightning rod for changes and paradoxes that the universe wants to prevent. Logically it’s hard to swallow, but if you can roll with it, it does make the story more exciting.
We’re still concerned about the plot issue that Tadiana mentioned in our review of One Word Kill ― we’re simply not convinced that the first instance of time-travel, the one that created all these problems for Nick and his friends, ever needed to happen in the first place. So far, the suffering and confusion that has resulted doesn’t seem worth it. We’re hoping Lawrence is going to convince us otherwise by the end of the trilogy but at this point we’re doubting it, and will reluctantly chalk it up to some extremely unadmirable selfishness or blinkered thinking on Nick’s part.
Fans of One Word Kill will surely enjoy Limited Wish. Other than the change in setting and the addition of a few new characters, it is an expansion of the story in One Word Kill and the prose, characterization, and dialog continue to impress us. We love how Nick talks about the way mathematics underlies the structure of the universe.
[T]here are fabulous beasts that swim in the seas of mathematics. Multidimensional behemoths of incredible beauty that even the best of minds struggle to glimpse. The equations we battle with, the proofs that we use to nibble at the edges of such wonders: these are the shadows cast by those we hunt.
We also love the retro feel of the novel and Kat, especially, can relate to these characters since she was also starting college in the fall of 1986. (And she will admit to occasionally, like Nick, wallowing in teenage misery while listening to Sisters of Mercy ― though she didn’t have as compelling reasons as Nick.)
The titles of the IMPOSSIBLE TIMES trilogy cleverly blend Nick’s personal life with the Dungeons & Dragons game he plays with his friends on the weekends. The title of the first book, One Word Kill, refers to Nick’s cancer diagnosis. Limited Wish, another spell used in Nick’s D&D game, reflects Nick’s realization that he can’t have everything he wants in life. Some things are going to have to be sacrificed. It’s also a metaphor for the idea that sometimes a small wish, or change, can have a major impact, which plays out in an intriguing way in the plot.
The final book is titled Dispel Illusion and will be released in November. We are wondering what illusions will be dispelled…
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!
Content note: scattered F-bombs and violence. ...more
This is the first book in a very cool, fast-paced time travel SF trilogy that mixes 1980’s Dungeons and Dragons (with a British teenage cast) + cancerThis is the first book in a very cool, fast-paced time travel SF trilogy that mixes 1980’s Dungeons and Dragons (with a British teenage cast) + cancer + time travel/multi-universe aspect. This first book is $1.99 on Kindle, at least right now. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature (in a different, collaborative form, with a couple of my co-reviewers at FanLit).
Nick, the 15 year old narrator of the story and a math genius, who's a wizard named Nicodemus in his D&D games, finds out that he has leukaemia right at the start of the story. His group of D&D-playing friends sticks behind him, including the girl, Mia, who recently joined the group. She's probably too cool for the nerdy Nick, but he's still interested in her. :) Nick also has a couple of pretty scary enemies from his school: the bully Michael Devis and the even more vicious Ian Rust.
One day, while Devis is picking on Nick, an older, balding man named Demus (hmmm) appears out of nowhere to slug Michael Devis in the mouth just as Devis is about to empty Nick’s backpack into a pool of vomit. Demus looks strangely familiar to Nick, and the reader figures out why pretty quickly (the clues aren’t exactly subtle). Soon Demus is explaining time travel to Nick, setting out a rationale for it in quantum mechanics, and giving Nick puzzles to solve to make his future ― and, significantly, Mia’s ― possible.
Things grow ominous when Ian Rust is expelled from school and takes up with a local drug dealer to whom Mia owes a debt. Demus makes things even more difficult by asking for a piece of technology that doesn’t exist except as a highly-secured prototype in Nick’s time.
I found the plot intriguing (I have to say I'm a fan of time travel tales and strongly predisposed to approve of them). Mark Lawrence’s writing style is also a noticeable step up from the usual:
A decade seemed like forever, and it would take three of them just to reach the age my mother was right now. Cancer had closed that down. Like the big C, curling in on itself, my view of the future had narrowed to tunnel vision, aimed squarely at the next week, next month … would I have a next year? I was carrying not only the burden of my sickness but the pressure of making something worthwhile of each day now that my towering stack of them had fallen into ruin and left me clutching at each hour as it slipped between my fingers.
The characters also appealed to me (well, except for the psychopathic Rust, with the “hole in his mind that needed to be filled with other people’s pain”) and the plot kept me engaged and interested.
When all was said and done, though, the motivation for Demus’ trip to the past seems clearly insufficient, given the high price that Demus knows it will cost. To say more would get us into spoiler territory, but perhaps the next book will clarify why it was so vitally necessary. As it currently stands, it was a big enough plot hole for me to knock down my rating by a star, especially when combined with too many logical questions being sidestepped with the rationale that Demus has to take certain actions simply because that’s the way it happened before.
Lawrence’s choice of “One Word Kill” as the title of this novel plays out in at least a couple of ways. A key point in a couple of the characters’ D&D games is a spell named “Power Word Kill”; Nick points out how “lame” he thinks this spell is because with every other bad thing that happens, there’s some chance, however small, that you can escape. But with Power Word Kill, there’s no chance at all to escape the spell if it’s cast at you. That same sense of inexorable death looms over Nick personally because of that “one word” every human dreads to hear: “Cancer.” But perhaps there’s a narrow way out for Nick after all…
The next book, Limited Wish, has just been released. It takes the plot in some interesting new directions!
I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley. Thank you!...more
ETA: This is too funny! Seanan McGuire is actually going to turn the Up-and-Under/Over the Woodward Wall element of this novel into a real book seriesETA: This is too funny! Seanan McGuire is actually going to turn the Up-and-Under/Over the Woodward Wall element of this novel into a real book series! https://www.tor.com/2019/07/01/announ... I am so there for this.
4.5 stars for Seanan McGuire's latest novel! Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature in a slightly different form, as a collaborative review with my friend and co-reviewer Jana. You should read our (excellent) joint review there! :D
James Reed and his assistant Leigh Barrow ― a pair of rebel alchemists of the mad scientist type ― have been doing human experimentation for years, trying to make/breed (it’s a combination of both) children who will embody the “Doctrine of Ethos” and have godlike magical powers. Because putting all this power in one person hasn’t worked, they split the Doctrine into its two components, math and language, between two fraternal twins. One twin will be a math genius; the other gifted with language and words. Raising these children under controlled conditions, the alchemists believe they can achieve the results they want and keep the powers under their own control.
Roger and Dodger are one of these sets of twins, separated at birth and adopted out to families living on opposite coasts of the United State of America. Roger is the language-gifted child and Dodger (a girl) is the math-gifted one. At age 7 the twins figure out that they have not only the ability to mentally communicate (through “quantum entanglement,” announces Roger triumphantly) but the capacity to see through each other’s eyes ― a revelation to Roger, who is completely colorblind. But meanwhile the single-minded alchemists are keeping a VERY close eye on them. They'll do anything - even murder - to make sure nothing interferes with their plans.
In Middlegame, McGuire blends together light science fiction, fantasy and some horror, and then tosses in elements of Greek philosophy (the aforementioned Doctrine of Ethos), Tarot-like concepts, timeline shifting, classic children’s literature, and more in an almost indescribable literary concoction. Initially I found it a little too muddled. I wanted the improbable road leading to the Impossible City to make more logical sense, and I thought the half-explained quasi-Tarot references to the King of Cups, Queen of Wands/Swords, Jack Daw, and Page of Frozen Waters were more distracting than useful. A. Deborah Baker only briefly appears at the very beginning of Middlegame, but her ideas inform the entire plot. The chapter-heading quotes from her Over the Woodward Wall add color to the main plot but didn’t supply all of the additional clarity and meaning I was looking for. (I deeply wish that this were an actual book, though!)
But a funny thing happened on my way to the virtual forum where Jana and I were exchanging our ideas and assembling our joint review. I dug back into the text of Middlegame and found that these various elements melded together far more satisfactorily than I thought on first read. Elements that at first seemed opaque appeared much clearer on second read. I especially like the idea of L. Frank Baum using The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to deliberately muddy Baker’s pure division of the four elements (water, air, fire and earth and the related humors) into four quadrants.
I’m still dubious about the “Doctrine of Ethos” as the concept underlying the entire alchemical plot. The original doctrine (a Greek theory of how music influences the thoughts and emotions of humans) has an extremely tenuous logical connection to how our unbalanced alchemists are literally embodying the Doctrine in a pair of individuals, “forc[ing] the Doctrine into flesh” as a way to influence the entire world, the fabric of time and reality itself. And I’ve concluded … you just have to roll with it. Suspend disbelief, strap yourself into your seat and enjoy the ride.
Smart kids get put on a pedestal by parents and teachers alike, and the rest of the class gathers around the base of it throwing rocks, trying to knock them down. People who say ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical.
McGuire has such a gift for putting profound insights into words that strike your heart. As Roger and Dodger, both lonely children who don’t really fit in with others, get to know each other through their long-distance telepathic relationship, they realize how much they fit together, the scholastic strengths of one matching the weaknesses of the other.
They can help each other. They can shore up the broken places. He knows the words for this: cooperation, symbiosis, reciprocity. So many words, and he’ll teach her all of them, if she’ll just keep being his friend.
I realized, not long before Roger and Dodger themselves mention it, that their last names, Middleton and Cheswich, combine to make Midwich, a clever reference to The Midwich Cuckoos, a classic SF horror novel about a group of alien children (partially) concealed among humans. In Middlegame, though, the cuckoos have our undivided sympathy.
Erin, the female half of one of Reed’s failed twin sets, turned assistant, developed into an excellent, multi-layered character, with far more depth than I initially expected. She ended up being one of my favorite characters … unlike Leigh, whose beauty hides an appalling bloodthirstiness.
I have to add that I think the main plot of Middlegame is ingenious. I loved experiencing the growth of Roger and Dodger and the twists and turns in their relationship, and seeing how their powers gradually manifested. The astrolabe in Reed’s lab turns out to be more than a lovely symbol. There’s some pretty cosmic stuff going on here! If this is just the middle game in this world, I’d love to read about the endgame.
Middlegame is a complex and thought-provoking novel that defies easy categorization. If you’re in the mood for something unusual, I strongly recommend Middlegame.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy!
Content notes: Some horror (THAT BURNING HAND THING) and violence, murder, attempted suicide, scattered F-bombs....more
More time travel fun! Or maybe "woes" would be a better adjective? Or both. :) Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Alice Payne arrives onMore time travel fun! Or maybe "woes" would be a better adjective? Or both. :) Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Alice Payne arrives on the scene in this 2018 Nebula-nominated novella, and it looks like she’s setting up for a longer but welcome stay. Alice Payne is a half-black, thirty-two-year-old woman living in 1788 England in a mansion called Fleance Hall, with her father and a handful of servants; she’s also a closeted queer woman in a secret relationship with her companion, an inventor named Jane Hodgson. Alice and her father have fallen into financial straits, and her father, who is suffering from severe PTSD as a result of fighting in the American Revolution, is unable to support them financially. So Alice has taken up highway robbery, in the guise of a highwayman called the Holy Ghost, choosing as her victims men who prey on women. (Though I found it improbable, apparently there are enough of these men traveling near Fleance Hall to allow Alice to support her household with her ill-gotten gains.)
Meanwhile, Prudence Zuniga, a black Belizean-Canadian woman born in the 22nd century, is desperately trying to prevent Crown Prince Rudolf from committing suicide in the year 1884. Prudence works for a time travel agency, the Teleosophic Core Command, or TCC, and one of the things they’re trying to do is prevent World War I by keeping Rudolf alive. Seventy times before, Prudence, in disguise as a servant, has failed to convince Rudolf’s lover, a dancer named Mitzi, to refuse to participate in Rudolf’s suicide pact. Unfortunately, things go wrong this time as well, and Prudence’s TCC boss finally pulls the plug on the Rudolf Project.
It’s the last straw for Prudence, who kicks into a higher gear her plot to end time travel permanently. She’s seen all the ways that time travelers have changed history, and it almost always ends up worse for our world. (Given that Prudence’s sister Grace is growing plantains north of Toronto, it’s clear that global warming is one of our future issues.) But Prudence needs a helper ― either a patsy or an accomplice ― in eighteenth-century England. She initially set her sights on Jane Hodgson, the inventor, but when her path accidentally crosses with Alice’s, Prudence decides Alice will do.
Kate Heartfield’s Alice Payne Arrives has three bright, unconventional women as the heart of its story. Alice and Jane, both highly intelligent women, are trying to deal with both the difficulties in their own lives ― financial, social and relationship issues ― and the discovery that time travel not only exists, but that they’re being asked to participate in Prudence’s plan, one that will affect billions of lives. The characters are appealing, and realistic with their human flaws.
Alice Payne Arrives is a well-thought-out novella with some intriguing concepts. Time travel is handled in a logical way; I loved the detail that changing the past also changes everyone’s memories of prior timelines, but Prudence and her fellow time travelers are able to keep track of the shifting timelines by keeping their personal journals safe back in the Precambrian era. Some of the details with the elements in Prudence’s scheme and with the competing time travel factions are a little murky. The “Farmers” are in a conflict with the “Misguideds,” but precisely what that means isn’t explained until quite late in the story.
It’s interesting to compare and contrast this novella with Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, also nominated for the 2018 Nebula award. Both novellas have people from the future mixing with people from the past, and altering the past, though in Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach it appears that the change is only temporary, while in Alice Payne Arrives, meddling with the past can have disastrous repercussions. Both novellas also have deeply problem-ridden future versions of our world, with people using the past to try to help solve their problems. Also, both are first books in what look to be ongoing series. I enjoyed both novellas, though Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is more detailed and, I think, more intriguing and creative in its world-building. Despite these superficial plot similarities, the stories these novellas tell and their main characters are quite different. I recommend both, especially to fans of time travel SF.
The ending of Alice Payne Arrives is quite abrupt (yet another way in which it is similar to Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach), though the ending of this novella is more clearly a temporary stopping point in a longer story arc. Since Heartfield has already published the sequel, Alice Payne Rides, its ending is a reasonable stopping point. Though this novella isn’t entirely satisfying as a stand-alone read, it’s a solid setup for a longer ALICE PAYNE series, and I’m definitely looking to read the sequel as soon as I can.
Heartfield has created a Goodreads page with several of her Kindle notes from Alice Payne Arrives; they’re worth reading along with this novella. The tidbit about the genesis of the name Fleance Hall is especially intriguing, and Macbeth fans will appreciate it.
4+ stars. I have such a soft spot for time travel tales, and this one is so intelligently written! Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Go4+ stars. I have such a soft spot for time travel tales, and this one is so intelligently written! Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach (2018), one of several exceptional novellas nominated for the 2018 Nebula award, combines some intelligent and subtle world-building in the aftermath of worldwide disasters, the future version of project financing and lobbying (with lamentable similarities to our current world), and time travel to ancient Mesopotamia as research for an environmental remediation project.
In the 23rd century, humanity is beginning to rebuild on the surface of the Earth after living underground for many years in “hives and hells.” Life on the surface is limited to specific habitats, and the need for expensive ecological restoration projects to make the habitats livable has led to funding consortiums with time-consuming (and headache-inducing) formal proposal requirements. In the excitement surrounding the discovery of time travel a decade or so ago, nearly all the funding shifted away from ecological restoration to time travel projects. Now Minh, a cynical 83-year-old ecologist with six prosthetic tentacle-like legs, has received a request for proposal (RFP) that combines both time travel and ecological restoration: going back to 2024 BCE Mesopotamia to study the drainage of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as a guide to future river remediation projects.
Minh is determined to win the project (the follow-on work could be extremely lucrative). She puts together a small team of three, roping in her colleague Hamid, a biologist who’s obsessed with horses, and reluctantly accepting her eager young administrative assistant Kiki as the third team member. Fabian, an abrasive “tactical historian” from TERN, the research group that discovered time travel, is their guide to the past.
The first half of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach focuses on the intricacies and subterfuges involved in grant-writing and lobbying to win the project, which may strike you as either dry and boring or reasonably interesting and richly ironic. Personally I found it more intriguing than tedious, but whether you find it appealing may depend on your literary tastes. There’s enough character-building and world-building to keep this section from getting monotonous, though. We get glimpses of the past disasters, including the plagues that affected Minh’s generation. There are constant references to “plague babies” like Minh and Hamid, who are physically smaller and frailer, as opposed to the younger generation of “fat babies” like Kiki, who are healthier and have much larger bodies (like humans in our day). Technology has taken the tenet of personal autonomy to entirely new levels, with people managing their own physical health and bodies in unexpected and sometimes even alarming ways.
The second half of the novella deals with the team’s time travel adventures in the ancient past in a vessel they name the Lucky Peach, after Minh’s peach orchard hobby. This trip is fascinating and imaginative, with some unexpected twists. The trip ― not surprisingly for the reader but certainly for the team ― turns out to be far more complicated and dangerous than our researchers expected. (The short flash-forward blurbs at the beginning of each chapter, from the point of view of the ancient Mesopotamian king Shulgi, are a broad hint that things are going to go very wrong for our time-traveling team.)
Time travel in this universe is not thought to affect the future; TERN claims that when people travel to the past, a “separate timeline is spun off from ours, and when the time travelers leave, the timeline collapses.” But that’s difficult to for Minh to swallow when people in the past suffer because of the team’s actions. The ancient Mesopotamians take a dim view of the “stars” watching them from the sky, not to mention their monstrous-looking (to them) but powerful visitors. Are they gods or monsters? Or do they have aspects of both?
I found the ending of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach startlingly abrupt, though I could make the case that it’s actually a befitting conclusion. Still, I was relieved to find out that Kelly Robson is currently writing a sequel, Time, Trouble and the Lucky Peach. It’ll be great fun to see what happens next with these characters.
I received a free copy of this novella from the publisher for review. Thank you!!...more
3.75 stars for this 2012 Nebula award-winning (and Hugo nominated) SF novella. I have a seriously alarming stack of books to read but I opened this on3.75 stars for this 2012 Nebula award-winning (and Hugo nominated) SF novella. I have a seriously alarming stack of books to read but I opened this one up last night and it was short enough and interesting enough to suck me in until I finished it (around 1 am). It's a combination of worldwide environmental disaster and time travel.
Kress freely jumps back and forth between a couple of different time periods in our day and a grim future, only about 20 years years later. A small, isolated group of people is making excursions to the past, kidnapping children to try to preserve our race in their day.
I had a couple of fairly major unanswered questions that are dragging my rating down a bit, but Nancy Kress is a talented SF author (I don't love everything of hers that I've read, but what I do like, I really like). It's an interesting, somewhat different take on the "humans are destroying our world" genre of SF.
Time travel + Jane Austen = two of my favorite literary subjects! Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
I’m an enthusiastic Jane Austen fanTime travel + Jane Austen = two of my favorite literary subjects! Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
I’m an enthusiastic Jane Austen fan (Pride and Prejudice is my desert island book of choice) but I had never heard of her unfinished novel The Watsons until reading The Jane Austen Project, a compelling time travel novel by Jane Austen devotee Kathleen Flynn. In this novel, an old Austen family letter has recently surfaced, indicating that Jane Austen actually did finish The Watsons but then destroyed most of it.
The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics ― a fancy title for a British government research center that has mastered the practical ability to send people back in time ― has now sent Rachel Katzman (a doctor and our narrator) and Liam Finucane (a scholar with a background in acting) to Regency-era England. They land in London in 1815, with the mission of infiltrating the social circle of Jane Austen so they can steal the Watsons manuscript. Their secondary mission: try to figure out what the illness was caused Jane’s death at the relatively young age of 41. They have a year before the time portal opens again: a single-shot chance to return to the future.
Liam and Rachel adopt the fictitious identities of William and Mary Ravenswood, a doctor and his spinster sister (Rachel is 33). After setting up house in London, Liam sends a letter to Jane Austen’s favorite brother Henry, claiming a mutual acquaintance (who is conveniently in Jamaica) and telling Henry that he and his sister Mary have recently returned to England from Jamaica, where they sold their sugar plantation and freed their slaves.
The introduction plan works, and soon Liam and Rachel are able to befriend Henry, with Rachel feeding Liam helpful medical advice when Henry falls ill. They know that soon Jane will be arriving to visit Henry, when their plan will move to Phase II. But the plan hits some bumps: Henry becomes romantically interested in Rachel/Mary, Cassandra is suspicious, and Liam and Rachel’s own relationship becomes, well, complicated. And Rachel finds herself tempted to go beyond the bounds of her mission to not just diagnose Jane’s illness, but perhaps find a way to cure it, despite her future society’s strict prohibition on doing anything that may significantly change the past.
Flynn’s love and knowledge of Jane Austen and Regency times shines through in the pages of The Jane Austen Project. Henry and Jane Austen are fully realized, complex characters. I really felt like I had met Jane herself through the pages of this book. Her developing friendship with Rachel was wholly believable and, understandably, Rachel is deeply torn by her assignment to abuse that friendship by rummaging through Jane’s possessions to try to locate and steal the manuscript for The Watsons. The setting shows the problems and limitations of Regency society as well as its charms. Rachel struggles with the limitations on the role of women, and medical and sanitary practices are appropriately primitive.
Flynn’s thoughtful and excellent writing in the historical parts of The Jane Austen Project falters somewhat when it comes to the romance and science fictional elements of the tale. The romance never fully engaged me, perhaps partly because it involved cheating on a third party (or even two, depending on how you view it). Flynn’s version of future society has some potentially interesting aspects to it, but it’s drawn with broad strokes and given somewhat short shrift. The actual mechanics of time travel are hand-waved (admittedly, Connie Willis does the same), and the impact of Rachel’s and Liam’s adventures in the past on the future struck me as squirrelly. I’m a bit of a stickler for time travel theories and how they play out in fictional novels. I don’t much care whether the author uses an immutable past theory, a parallel universe theory or something else, as long as the effect of changing the past (or attempting to do so) plays out in a way that makes some kind of sense to me … but I had serious trouble suspending my disbelief here.
It’s clear Flynn’s heart and true interests are in Jane Austen and her era. I enjoyed The Jane Austen Project greatly for those parts, but then, I’m a devoted Austen fan. I recommend this novel primarily to readers who have an interest in Jane Austen and her times, and who don’t mind a novel playing a bit fast and loose with time travel theory.
Content notes: A scene or two with somewhat explicit sexual content and maybe a couple of F-bombs, IIRC....more
Tor online freebie: a bleak, harsh story about a group of time travelers trying to delay the end of the world, with a thread of hope running through iTor online freebie: a bleak, harsh story about a group of time travelers trying to delay the end of the world, with a thread of hope running through it. It's a thought-provoking story, though it does have a bit of an incomplete vibe to it, like it's an introduction to a novel or series (which I don't think is the case). One of the characters is called Constance Wills - I love the shout-out to Connie Willis.
Full review to come.
Content notes: disturbing imagery and sexual violence....more
$1.99 Kindle special, March 2, 2018, for this 2010 Newbery award winner. And karen gave it 5 stars! so I'm off to buy it now.$1.99 Kindle special, March 2, 2018, for this 2010 Newbery award winner. And karen gave it 5 stars! so I'm off to buy it now....more
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