→ August 27, 2020
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This is How You Lose the Time War.

This is How You Lose the Time War won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella this year, limited to works that run between 17,500 and 40,000 words, among the many plaudits for its unusual call-and-response structure and its commentary on war. Written by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, the book follows two time-traveling soldiers on opposite sides of an interdimensional war who find common threads between them and eventually fall in love through their letters to one another.

The only names we get for those two soldiers are Red and Blue, although they’ll refer to each other by various puns and nicknames as their relationship moves from taunting to affection over the course of the novel. The nature of the war they’re fighting is never quite clear, other than that they both seek to alter the courses of history in various instances of the multiverse by changing single events that will ripple forward in a sound-of-thunder-like pattern to enact massive changes in societies, civilizations, and even entire species. They go about implementing those changes in different ways, but they seem to be assigned to similar or related tasks, so their paths nearly cross multiple times, which allows them to start communicating with each other, secretly, in strange and incredibly imaginative ways.

They are, of course, being watched at the same time, by shadowy presences and interdimensional seekers, spies who want to decode Red and Blue’s missives to one another, and eventually that matter has to come to a head to provide some narrative thrust to the story. How the two figure this out and plot a way to escape their pursuers and fool their bosses, which risks splitting them apart forever, is the real purpose of the story, since we never get that much sense or meaning of what exactly the two sides want from the Time War.

This is How You Lose the Time War is a slow burn despite its short duration. The prose isn’t easy; both authors jump right into the new vernacular of their multiverse, and it teeters on the edge of the ridiculous for a while before the plot comes along to subsume any concerns you might have about word choices or syntax. There’s also a leap, pun intended, when Red and Blue go from rivalry to deep affection in the span of just a few letters; it felt incredibly sudden, as if the mutual respect they develop on the temporal battlefield was enough to make them fall in love with each other, visible in the abrupt shift in the language and tone of their notes.

It’s hard to entirely buy why they fall so hard for one another, but the payoff is strong; it feels like the two authors needed the first half of the book to find a shared rhythm, and once they got it, they could both put their feet on the gas. I didn’t quite buy how they fell in love, but once Red and Blue are there, and their budding relationship is threatened by the powers that be (were, will be, always are?) in their timelines, it’s credible and compelling – and the way it ends is satisfying and avoids the too-predictable traps into which the authors might have fallen. The novella is probably my least favorite format of prose fiction, compared at least to novels and short stories, but This is How You Lose the Time War felt like it was just the right length, and the way the two authors intertwine their voices produces a remarkable, emotional book.

Next up: I’ve already finished N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became and moved on to Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson’s Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back.

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→ August 26, 2020
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Palm Springs.

Palm Springs, available now to stream on Hulu, is a smarter reboot of Groundhog Day, without the cameo from an impossibly young Michael Shannon, but in some ways still falls prey to the flaws of its inspiration. It’s a time-loop story that explicitly rejects the idea that there’s some moral lesson the trapped protagonists have to learn to escape it, and instead forces one of them to confront the fears that have led him to accept his fate rather than fighting it.

Nyles (Andy Samberg) is a guest at the wedding of his girlfriend’s sister, and when we first see the ceremony, he comes to the rescue of another of the bride’s sisters, Sarah (Cristin Millotti), as she’s fumbling through the maid-of-honor speech she didn’t realize she was supposed to deliver. This leads to them hooking up, but that’s interrupted by something else and, long story short, they both end up caught in a time loop where they must repeat the day of the wedding over, and over.

It turns out that Nyles has already been stuck in this time loop for a while, and that itself leads to all sorts of complications, especially once Sarah tires of it after a few trips around the carousel and decides she wants out – with or without Nyles. It turns out that they each have a significant secret that they don’t reveal to the other for quite some time, and while Nyles’ secret infuriates Sarah, Sarah’s secret is the bigger revelation. There’s also one more person stuck in the time loop, Ray (J.K. Simmons), who throws a wrench, or an arrow, into the works, although his role is best left undiscussed.

For a swift movie with a thin, familiar premise, Palm Springs does quite a bit right. It’s often very funny, and it’s a lot more than just Samberg playing the same character he always plays (Nyles is little more than Jake Peralta without a badge). The whole subplot with Roy, including how he got stuck in the time loop in the first place, is frequently hilarious, as are some of the smaller bits in the first half of the film. Millotti displays quite a penchant for comedy, especially when outraged – there’s an art to dropping an F-bomb and making it funny, and she has it – and by about halfway through the film, it’s clear that she is, or at least should be, the main character here. While flawed, she’s the stronger, smarter, and wittier of the two, and she’s ultimately the one who finds a possible exit from their infinite loop.

Which brings up the two major problem with Palm Springs: Why is Sarah romantically interested in Nyles? True, he’s far more into her than she is into him, but she is into him, even though their connection beyond the shared experience of the time loop is thin. She does far more to make their time in the loop more tolerable than he does. She’s also more willing to examine her own misdeeds than he is. She’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, right down to her petite frame and “doe eyes,” and if you couldn’t guess from the fact that she’s into the aimless protagonist who can’t get out of his own way that this script was written by a man, well, it was.

There are some minor technical issues with the way Palm Springs handles its time loop, although that’s true of just about every work of fiction that includes time travel. (I’ll argue forever that Connie Willis does it best in her Oxford series of novels and stories, because she makes time travel itself extremely difficult and limited in scope.) The script is so concerned with getting its two protagonists out of the loop that it sort of forgets everyone else involved, which is understandable Sarah’s secret is left unresolved in the end, even though it affects more characters than just her and Nyles, and, if you’ve seen the movie already, I’d love to know what you thought of Sarah’s grandmother’s last comment to her near the end of the film. But ultimately, it was the unconvincing nature of Sarah’s interest in Nyles that brought Palm Springs down from great to merely good – still very funny, and sometimes thoughtful, just not entirely plausible form any perspective other than Nyles’.

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→ August 7, 2018
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The Lost Time Accidents.

John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents is yet another novel that someone recommended to me months ago, maybe longer, but I have long since forgotten who it was who suggested it – or maybe I made that up and stumbled upon a review of the book elsewhere and liked the sound of it. I was unfamiliar with John Wray’s work previous to this, and he’s clearly a brilliant thinker, well-versed in science and philosophy, but the book never quite seemed to provide the payoff in terms of plot or character, especially not around the central mystery of time travel that is too enmeshed in the core story to end up without any real resolution.,

Waldemar is the central character and narrator of The Lost Time Accidents, the latest generation of a family that has been obsessed with the physics of time travel – treating time as a fourth dimension of space that can be manipulated in the same way as the first three – since at least the time of his great-grandfather. Waldemar’s antecedents have included physicists and cranks, as well as one man whose work inspired a Scientology-like cult convinced that he’d solved the secret of time travel. In the twin narratives, Waldemar repeats his tortuous family history, and explains that he is currently somewhere else, exiled from the timestream, unable to return to it, and unaware of how or why he’s been kicked out of time in such a fashion.

For a book ostensibly about time travel, The Lost Time Accidents has remarkably little time travel in it – and the few mentions of it therein are of questionable veracity. Waldemar was raised in ignorance of the family’s history of time travel experiments, or, in the words of his mother, of mental illness, but is eventually drafted into the obsession with time travel by his eccentric aunts, one of whom has pursued time-travel physics in secret for decades in the New York apartment the two women share.

The similarities between The Lost Time Accidents and Infinite Jest work to the former’s detriment, in large part because it’s so hard for any writer to live up to the standard set by the polymathic David Foster Wallace in his sprawling, wryly comic magnum opus. Wray obviously has a strong layman’s grasp of the theories of general and special relativity, but the story is much stronger when he’s covering the weird cult that has sprung up around the Accidents and Waldemar’s father, and the hints that these people are all just seriously delusional, Waldemar included. (Wray’s previous novel, Lowboy, has a schizophrenic protagonist, so this may be a focus for him. I haven’t read any of his other works.) I interpreted this novel as a sort of test for the reader – do you think any of this is real, that Waldemar’s great-uncle, his aunts, or his father had some insight into time travel? Is Waldemar actually trapped outside of time (but obviously not space), and is any of what he sees there real?

The DFW comparison is more favorable to Wray on an analytical level, given the somewhat aimless storyline, as Wray plays with words and concepts around time. Ottokar, the ancestor of Waldemar who starts all this nonsense, makes pickles for a living by fermenting them, the classic method of preserving food using microbes and a little time to allow the fermented items to defy time by avoiding decay. Waldemar’s father is named Orson Card, a rather obvious reference to the Mormon science fiction writer behind Ender’s Game, and Orson’s works become the foundation for a Scientology-like cult. The very title of the book plays with the modern factory-safety idea of “X days without a lost time accident” while alluding to Proust’s opus on time and memory, In Search of Lost Time. It is as if Wray had a bucket overflowing with ideas for allusions and references to time and its effects, and decided to stuff as many into the book as it could handle, then decided to stuff the rest in there too. That makes it an interesting philosophical novel, one that left me with plenty to ponder after it was over, but I wanted more plot and character development than Wray was able to provide.

Next up: Nearly done with Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion.

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→ June 17, 2017
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Blackout and All Clear.

Connie Willis’ time-travel novels are a marvel; she’s created an alternate universe where time travel isn’t just possible, but plausible, because it’s intrinsic to her plots but not to the characters or the setting. The first full-length novel, The Doomsday Book, sent a character back to the period of the Black Death at the same time that a pandemic hit Oxford in 2060, where the time-traveling historians reside. The second, To Say Nothing of the Dog, was a comedy of manners that parodied a Brit Lit classic. Her 2010 diptych Blackout/All Clear is a magnum opus in scope and length, a single novel published in two parts because the combination runs over 1100 pages, sending three historians back into World War II only to have everything go awry for them. The duo swept the major sci-fi novel awards (Hugo, Nebula, and Locus) despite some reviews that criticized the books’ length. I adore Willis’ writing and character development, so while the books are long – it took me just over two weeks to finish the pair – my only regret at their length was that I was dying to get to the resolution.

Willis’ time-travel universe keeps that physical impossibility to something of a minimum. Historians travel backwards in time for research purposes, and of course are charged with staying out of the way of history lest they find they alter it. Spacetime itself has a defense mechanism, however; it won’t allow time travelers to land at a point in history where their mere presence may change its course – so, no, you can’t go back and kill baby Hitler, even in fiction. Those who try end up displaced in time or location from their target, and the gap is called “slippage.” Meanwhile, returning through a portal, called a drop, to 2060 is also complicated – the drops must not be seen by “contemps” from that time period, and if the location isn’t secure, the drop won’t open and the historian can’t return home until the next rendezvous. It’s an elegant, concise way to introduce time travel and all of its attendant problems into serious literature that would otherwise collapse under the weight of the details.

Unlike Willis’ previous two novels in this setting, nearly all of Blackout/All Clear takes place in the past. Once the historians start to step through the portal into World War II at the start of the first book, we don’t get back to Oxford until well into All Clear; this is a novel of three historians stuck in World War II, simultaneously trying to find a way back to their present and to avoid doing anything that might alter history … which could in turn mean that time travel is never invented, creating a paradox with unforeseeable consequences (none of them good, though). Michael Davies wants to research heroes, but ends up in the evacuation at Dunkirk. Polly Churchill wants to research the conditions and behavior of people who sheltered in Tube (subway) stations during the Blitz, but ends up in a shelter below a church and falls into an amateur theatrical troupe. Merope Ward wants to research the lives of evacuated children in the English countryside, only to find herself saving one of her ward’s lives and bringing some of the children back to London to an uncertain fate during the bombings. The three all realize soon enough that something’s amiss, between the slippage and the failure of their drops to reopen, and start to look for each other in London to seek a way out before the paradoxes of time travel overtake them.

Willis’ prose captures the cadence and flow of great British authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries, even though she’s an American author writing today, with the clarity and wit of a Wodehouse and a bit of the descriptiveness of Dickens (but not too much). She also creates wonderful characters, a few of whom, like department head Mr. Dunworthy or young Colin Templer, we’ve seen before. Merope, who goes by Eileen in the past, and Polly are a little bit too similar to each other, although some slight personality distinctions emerge in the second book, but the characters around the core trio are wonderfully diverse and well filled-out, from the actor Sir Godfrey to the aging fisherman Commander Harold to the imps Alf and Binnie who plague Merope’s existence. Willis has given her world depth and texture by populating it with believable, three-dimensional characters, even unlikable ones, so that reading her novels, especially this two-part tome, becomes an immersive experience. I was very much reminded of watching the Foyle’s War TV series, which is set almost entirely in World War II and even has one episode that occurs in part in a bomb shelter; Willis recreated that setting in words to the point where I could lose myself in the story.

Blackout itself isn’t much of a standalone novel because it ends mid-story; there is absolutely zero resolution at its end, not even so much as an answer to the question of why these historians have gotten stuck when their colleagues had gone to other points in history and returned without major incident. If you’re going to read one, you’re committing to read both, and that does mean that you’ll be in the past with the trio of trapped heroes for a long time. I’m completely comfortable with that – I will happily spend all day in Connie Willis’ words if my schedule permits.

Next up: I’ve read a few books since this pairing, but just started another Hugo winner, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, which definitely sounds like something other than a critically acclaimed sci-fi novel.

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→ September 9, 2016
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Doomsday Book.

Connie Willis is one of the most decorated science fiction writers ever, with eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards, as well as induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Her 1998 novel To Say Nothing of the Dog, a Hugo winner, is one of my favorite sci-fi novels, a tight mash-up of a comedy of manners and a time travel story along with a send-up of a classic Brit Lit novel. That book was set in the same universe as her 1992 novel Doomsday Book, which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for best sci-fi novel, and explores much darker subject matter: how we respond to unthinkable disaster and human suffering.

Willis has crafted rules around her fictional time travel that manage to give it sufficient plausibility so that suspending your disbelief isn’t really an issue. Her time travelers are historians heading into the past for research purposes (usually), and do so under tightly controlled conditions. Heading into the past to alter history isn’t permitted by spacetime itself; anyone heading through to create such a paradox simply won’t be allowed to enter the “net” of time travel. And there’s “slippage” in time, the difference between when you arrive and when you were trying to arrive, which the researchers attribute to spacetime’s attempts to avoid even minor incidents like having you appear out of nowhere in the middle of a crowd of people who’d think you were an alien or a witch.

In Doomsday Book, a young woman in Oxford’s history department named Kivrin is heading back to 1320 England to examine village life of the time and as a prelude to a future research trip back to the Black Death, which began in England in 1348. Unfortunately, as soon as she steps through the net into the past, the main technician who organized the drop, Badri, falls horribly ill with a new strain of influenza, touching off an epidemic in modern-day Oxford … with Kivrin unfortunately falling sick as she arrives in the past. Something has gone wrong with the drop, but Badri is near death and unable to tell anyone why or to explain how they will retrieve Kivrin at the scheduled rendezvous time and place. Kivrin, meanwhile, ends up involved in a separate epidemic, as the plague arrives in the village where she’s staying, and since she’s been vaccinated she is the only person there with immunity to the disease. Her response, as the only person in her time and place who understands the nature of the plague, and the responses of those in the modern time are the real focus of the book, from those thinking first and foremost about the victims to those stuck in the mindset of adhering to policy or those unable to give up their own goals even when it puts others at grave risk.

Willis is an outstanding writer in every aspect of the term, from plot to pacing to character development, but two things particularly stand out in Doomsday Book. One is her ability to still weave humor into a story that is incredibly dark and full of tragedy, with many deaths of named characters in both timelines. William Gaddson, an undergraduate who is rather successful with the young ladies but whose overbearing mother thinks he’s a fragile, innocent boy who studies too hard, provides regular comic relief and even plays a real role in the plot. The American bell choir stuck inside the quarantine zone is almost absurd in its zeal to put on a show regardless of conditions. The assistant Finch’s obsession with “lavatory paper” is similar in its “oh my God is he still on about that” nature.

One of the first symptoms of this influenza strain is mental confusion, and Willis manages to impart that to the reader without actually confusing the reader about what’s happening. That is, when the character at the center of the action gets sick and begins to suffer the confusion, Willis gets that across in ways that don’t cause the reader to lose understanding of what’s happening. I found I realized some things weren’t making sense, so the character’s confusion was tangible, but I also could follow what was happening as an observer (since it’s written entirely in the third person) rather than just getting lost myself. That balance is a neat trick and takes a skilled writer to pull off.

Doomsday Book touches on some significant themes, notably some of the characters’ difficulty in reconciling their belief in God with the horrors of the epidemics before them and the deaths of friends and family members. Some fall to disbelief, others to superstition or belief that it’s God’s vengeance. Those who remain after the epidemics have ended, however, seem to all have come to some appreciation of the kindness and mercy of others, even those facing their own deaths, in the face of unimaginable fear and difficulty. Kivrin’s final encounter with a dying plague victim provides the most moving, insightful scene of the book, even though both characters see the situation from almost perfectly opposed perspectives.

As with To Say Nothing of the Dog and Willis’ shorter novel Bellwether, which I read in June and loved but never had time to review, I couldn’t put Doomsday Book down, reading its nearly 600 pages in just over a week. I’ll have to get to her most recent novel in the Oxford universe, the 2010 two-part novel Blackout/All Clear, which also swept the major awards and runs over 1,000 pages in total.

Next up: I read Philip José Farmer’s Hugo winner To Your Scattered Bodies Go this week and hated just about everything about it. I’m about to start Laurent Binet’s World War II novel HHhH today, which has to be better.

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→ December 30, 2014
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To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Connie Willis’ Hugo-winning novel To Say Nothing of the Dog is a tight mélange of three distinct styles of fiction: A comedy of manners, a time-travel novel, and a literary parody, all tied up into a coherent single narrative that reminded me of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, less witty but more sophisticated in structure and story.

Ned Henry works as a time-travelling historian in the 2040s, helping the imperious Lady Schrapnell rebuild the Coventry Cathedral in as authentic a fashion as possible, which means jumping back to just before the Luftwaffe’s raid on Coventry to see what the cathedral looked like, including the evasive (and very ugly) bishop’s bird stump, a wrought-iron monstrosity that has disappeared from the records and the scene. When one of Ned’s colleagues, the beautiful Verity Kindle, appears to break the rules of time-travel by bringing a non-insignificant object back from a trip to the 1880s, Ned is sent backwards in time to try to undo the damage, dropping himself into a Wodehousian setup of mismatched couples, mistaken identities, charlatans, mad mothers, and precious fishes – to say nothing of the dog.

Willis’ title comes from Jerome K. Jerome’s fictional travelogue, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), which I’m reading now to try to catch up on the allusions I missed. (One is off base, though; Willis puts an actual dog in Jerome’s boat, even though the real-life boat trip that Jerome used as the basis for his book did not include the canine Montmorency.) Fforde’s literary allusions and stabs at satire were broader and easier to catch; Willis succeeds more in the other two aspects of her novel, mimicking the Victorian comedy of manners (and, later, early 20th century English mysteries) and utilizing time-travel as more than just a plot device.

Willis’ time travel involves a self-correcting “continuum” that works to prevent historical incongruities that would change future events; for example, historians who attempt to travel back in time to assassinate Hitler can’t land anywhere close (in space-time) to him. Jumps into the past can create “slippage” of time or space that increases around a potential incongruity, so when Verity brings back something she shouldn’t have (in fact, that the “net” of time-travel should have prevented her from bringing back at all), the scientists assume they’ve created an incongruity and worked to correct it.

The shift from the imitation of comic novels – including the Jeeves-like butler Baine, who did, in fact do it, but “it” isn’t the it you think it might be – to a mystery that takes on aspects of those of Agatha Christie and especially Dorothy Sayers (the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries), with Ned and Verity working together to try to figure out where the bishop’s bird stump has gone, what the incongruity might be, and how to fix it. As in Christie’s novels, there are side mysteries, such as what Ned’s colleague Finch is doing running around in 1888 pretending to butle while on a secret mission for the time-travel department, or why the continuum sends Ned back to a dark tower in the late 1300s when he was just trying to get back to the present.

The greatest strength of the book is the Victorian characters, who are mostly of the upper-class twit variety, including the domineering yet gullible Mrs. Mering, her simpering daughter Tocelyn (“Tossie”), and the fraudulent psychic Madame Iritosky. We’re also treated to an ongoing debate between two professors of history in 1888, Professor Overforce and Professor Peddick, whose argument on the nature of free will and the causes of history itself dovetails nicely with the overall theme of the net, the continuum, and self-correction of incongruities. There’s also a plethora of silly (but still funny) jokes around confusion of names and people, and a fair bit of physical comedy as well.

To Say Nothing of the Dog drags for a short stretch after Ned has first arrived in 1888, once when we’re waiting for him to realize what he’s brought back for Verity (it’s obvious to the reader from the start) and another time when we’d really like the Merings to just get on with whatever it is they’re supposed to be getting on with, two sections where the situational humor can’t mitigate the glacial pacing of the plot. Those are temporary, and once Ned and Verity get cracking on the ultimate mystery of the continuum’s odd behavior, the narrative steps on the gas and doesn’t let up until a rousing, pitch-perfect finish that wraps up almost every plot thread but leaves one critical question unanswered for us and for the characters, an ambiguity that would have driven Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells to spontaneous combustion.

Next up: Before tackling Jerome K. Jerome, I knocked off Jo Walton’s Hugo winner, the wonderful novel Among Others, which is on sale for $2.99 in the Kindle edition through that link.

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