Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 107, April 2019

Nebula 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.