a matter of time

"a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff"

Apr 02, 2024

I love a good time travel story, don’t you? Of course, the actually good ones are pretty few and far between. I’ve found that I most enjoy that rare balance of providing the reader with just enough details so we can understand the rules, and therefore know when they break, and the parameters of what can happen but no more. I want to understand, but not be so confused that I give up trying to piece things together at all and become completely removed from the plot. I like just enough details to “get it” and then a few red herrings that (try to) throw me off the scent. Basically, I want my faith in the author and my attention to their story to be rewarded1. But, I’m sure time travel stories are a bitch to write. Why do authors do this to themselves? Thankfully for us, they do.

Now, one of today’s books doesn’t even attempt to make scientific sense, and it works for the voice and tone of that one specifically. But, some titles in this genre take themselves way too seriously so I take them seriously and then it turns out they’ve just made a bunch of shit up that doesn’t track and hoped the reader won’t read too closely. Now they are dead to me forever. 2

~~Tomorrow~~ ~~Yesterday~~ Today we’ll swing from the poetic to the absurd as we dive into the fabric of space and time armed with our dearest friend, a book.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Our unnamed protagonist3 is hired to work at the recently created Ministry of Time as a “bridge”: a babysitter of sorts for one of their “expats” or a person they’ve forcibly relocated from time. Time travel being so new and experimental, no one is sure the effect it’ll have on the expats’ body or mind, much less its effect on history and that pesky space/time continuum. As our main character lives and works with “1847” (the actual real life Arctic explorer Commander Graham Gore) confusions are created, lines are blurred, feelings are developed and conspiracies are uncovered.

The official synopsis for this one led me to expect a light, fun comedy of errors and more classic romance tropes than what I got. In actuality, this has a bit of a melancholy tone with a heightened (but often held-at-arms length) emotional depth and some terrifically zapping descriptions with SAT level vocabulary words. Odd metaphors kept the story engaging and weird while essences of mystery, romance, thriller and comedy combined in ways both droll and heavy. It plays with the balance of confronting the past with hope for a potentially doomed future alongside themes of confronting complicity, colonialism and generational trauma.

I loved its self-reflective poking at our modern culture through the experiences of the expats and while the romance is fairly central to the plot, this isn’t a romantic comedy. We’ve got an emotionally stunted, complicated and layered heroine inside a slow building, tension filled relationship. Not a trope a page. Honestly, the final climax was a bit fuzzy to me (-_-) and while I guessed a few of the twists, I thoroughly enjoyed much of this including its heavier themes, some of the historical revelations and, of course, its yearning, angsty romance.

Extra Credit: Just learned a TV series is in the works! Delighted to hear it.

“and so, in the back of mind, an hourglass turned.”

…

“In deference to the weather, he had rolled up his shirtsleeves, and the erotic charge of his bare forearms was giving me a headache… He filled the room like a horizon.”

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Two operatives, Red and Blue, are on opposite sides of an endless Time War. Throughout time and space, they painstakingly fall in love while exchanging letters that begin with taunts and soon evolve into something heart-wrenchingly romantic. However, war does not support a happy ending. It demands a winner and a loser.

The writing here is poetic, emotionally transportive and endlessly creative. The ways the letters are left for the other to find are gloriously inventive and the letters themselves create a world of their own, seemingly populated by just Red and Blue. This novella accomplishes more in its 200 pages than many novels do with double that length. It is poetic and full of feelings, gorgeous settings, unique worlds, strong character arcs and a deep romance created from the ground up. A word painting, it connects the sublime with the mundane, the ugly with the beautiful and the gigantic with the minuscule. It’s an escapist work with the brutal co-existing with the beautiful to reveal a continually unfolding, painfully lovely yet suspenseful enemies-to-lovers situation. Don’t take this one too literally, its meant to be a love poem; dreamy, passionate and inspiring. You’ll finish this hopeful and swooning.

“Red rarely sleeps, but when she does, she lies still, eyes closed in the dark, and lets herself see lapis, taste iris petals and ice, hear a blue jay's shriek. She collects blues and keeps them.”

…

“Have you ever tasted rose hips, in tea or jam? A tart sourness that cleans the teeth, refreshes, smells like a good morning. A mash of rose hips and mint keeps me steepling my fingers all day long, to keep those scents in my head. Sumac, too—I think you might like sumac.”

Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

The first in The Chronicles of St Mary's Series , this delightfully titled 4 novel follows Max as she joins an organization that “'investigates major historical events in contemporary time”. This organization isn’t the most competent, so Max goes from catastrophe to catastrophe with a few stops at Lovers Lane , Betrayal Byway and Running for Your Life Road. Along with a ludicrous cast of characters who have the entirety of history at their fingertips, Max must bring all her ingenuity, bravery and out-of-the-box thinking to her tasks of observing history, outrunning time paradoxes and defeating friends turned foes all before tea.

With a sort of Douglas Adams-y vibe, full of nonsense and absurdity, this one doesn’t even attempt to explain the science of it all. The tech just works. Until it doesn’t, and then random preposterous events occur, sometimes with deep and dire plot and character consequences that somehow always get worked out, though not too neatly. This has suspense, romance, a healthy does of time wimey-ness and a dash of slow burn sexiness. Its a chaotic romp through nonsense with some history scattered about like rice after a wedding. Don’t expect it to make much sense or be too into things like “character backstory” or “plot coherence”, just go along for the ride. It is one of those books to read when you want pure fluff.5

Real talk incoming: Ok, so here is the deal with this series. Maybe its like self-published or just very lightly edited for some reason because I remember it having more than the usual number of typos and grammatical errors in the later books. And, oh my god I just checked and this series is now at #14.5!? 6 Fellow readers, I quit after #10.7 And even that was way too far. It got extremely convoluted and repetitive, refused to follow its own rules and became sort of darkly exhausting. Proceed after the first at your own peril.

“Strangely, I found the conclusion quite liberating. When you’re fucked, you’re fucked. Things really can’t get much worse.”

From newsletters past

A favorite of mine, All Our Wrong Todays would fit quite nicely into this category 8