Kaliane Bradley entered the crowded field of time-travel fiction last year with her debut novel The Ministry of Time, earning a Hugo nomination for Best Novel and landing a coveted spot on Barack Obama’s best-of-2024 list. It’s a marvelous book that does this sort of fiction right: it’s very light on the time-travel parts, and spends extremely little time worrying about the mechanics or the paradoxes, instead jumping off time travel for a story that is by turns philosophical, psychological, and quite romantic.
The narrator of The Ministry of Time is a British-Cambodian woman, like Bradley, and has been working in various government agencies when she’s tabbed for a special project as a ‘bridge’ to one of six people that the British government has plucked from history and brought to the present. There is a single time-travel door, and while the government hasn’t mastered its use – far from it, as we learn – they went through history and found people who were otherwise about to die, usually in horrible ways, to ‘save’ them by way of making them guinea pigs in a massive experiment. The narrator’s charge is Commander Graham Gore, who was aboard the HMS Terror during the doomed Franklin Expedition in the Arctic waters north of and around what is now Nunavut, where the search for a Northwest Passage to Asia led to the death by exposure and starvation of over 100 men, along with no survivors. The Ministry extracted Gore, knowing he would die shortly anyway (so his removal would not affect the historical timeline), and put him in the narrator’s care, housing them together in a shared apartment once he’s released from several weeks of confinement and forced re-education so he and his fellow time travelers, some of whom came from the 1600s, would know what a car is or how money works.
There is a thriller here within The Ministry of Time – as you might imagine, the British Crown’s intentions here are hardly pure or altruistic – but the novel is a love story at its core, as the narrator and Graham develop feelings for each other from very early on, despite the gulf between them in times, cultures, and ethnic origins. (Race and racism are frequent fodder for dry humor in the book, especially as the various ‘expats’ from times past, all of whom are white, struggle to adjust to a multicultural society where a whole bunch of words are no longer suitable for common use.) The relationship comes across as natural, almost inevitable, including the required element where one gets furious at the other and appears to break things off, which here happens simultaneously with the big twist and leads to a slightly ambiguous but extremely satisfying conclusion.
Bradley also has a knack for creating supporting characters who manage to be three-dimensional and yet still useful in various ways, often for humor but occasionally for purposes of intrigue or suspense. The narrator’s own handler, Quentin, might be a conspiracy theorist, or he might know more than he lets on. Maggie, from the 1600s, turns out to be a saucy wench (channeling my inner Laurence Sterne here), and gets to explore her sexuality in a way that would never have been permitted in her time. Arthur was about to die during World War I, and has a harder time adjusting to the fact that he’s now in a time when his life and liberty won’t be at risk just because he’s gay. And Adela, the Ministry of Time’s Vice Secretary, starts out as a sort of comic relief taskmaster character, but plays an increasingly essential role in the plot as the story develops.
I said before reading The Ministry of Time that I thought it was going to win the Hugo, because it had so much hype and positive press behind it, and because the last ten nine authors to win the Hugo for Best Novel have all been women, with only one of the other six nominated works written by a woman author. Bradley’s work also includes significant explorations of race, sexual orientation, and culture, again all things the voters have tended to favor, over the sort of hard sci-fi that dominated the award’s first 40-odd years – with the winners then nearly always white men. (One exception is The Calculating Stars, the 2019 winner, one of the worst novels ever to take this award. The author was the President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association at the time.) Now that I’ve read it, I also think it’s going to win because it deserves it* – it would be an upper-half novel among all the winners, probably the best novel to win since N.K. Jemisin’s three straight wins, just edging out T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone. It’s sci-fi, but it’s literary sci-fi, one that uses a single speculative element to tell the sort of story an author couldn’t tell otherwise, and those are nearly always the best examples of the form.
*The other three nominees I’ve read, all of which were good: Service Model, A Sorceress Comes to Call, and The Tainted Cup.
Next up: Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, a classic of 20th century Italian literature.
I was able to score this from the library rather quickly, though in a large print version*. Extremely enjoyable take on time travel, with the emphasis less on mechanics — though the ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness’ concept was compelling — and more on acclimation and assimilation. Bradley’s plotting was better than fine, but what carried the day for me was the superb character writing across even the smaller roles. The romance was credible and touching, and Bradley’s timing regarding its development is perfectly controlled and calibrated. And while I’m glad this didn’t seem designed to kick off a series of books, it does leave the door open to revisit these characters of Bradley wants to at a later date.
*My vision actually warrants large print, but after 50 years of reading standard point size novels and ingraining pacing based on page count, it’s disorienting to navigate the swollen page count and beats falling in “odd” places.