The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 April 2020
by Elan Mastai
Deep in the future, there is surely a strict rule for time travelers, that they stay hidden from the times they visit, to prevent them meddling with history. Such a rule must be in place, or we would have met people from the future by now. Surely, someone would come back to 2020 to find out just what the hell was wrong with humanity at this bizarre historical moment. Since they haven't appeared, much less at one of Stephen Hawking's time travel parties, we should probably assume that time travel is basically impossible. At least in any form that would let a living breathing person shake hands with Jesus Christ, or Genghis Khan. We're stuck with the time travel we have, one second per second, one direction only. At varying speeds of course: painfully slow in line at the DMV; way too fast on prom night.
Tom Barren knows all of this, intuitively. But he lives in a techno-utopian future, the kind envisioned on the covers of pulp science fiction novels of the 1950s and 60s. Because it was in 1965 when the world was transformed by the invention of a machine that generates essentially infinite free energy from the motion of the Earth through the cosmos. That energy spawned all the magical science-fiction inventions of the Future that any reader could imagine. And, in the end, it spawned the time machine. Tom's father built it, the woman he adores is going to pilot it, and a group of chrononauts are going back to 1965, the one place and time the machine can actually pinpoint, and watch the invention of their future. Wackiness ensues. Through a series of tragic and unfortunate events, our narrator, Tom, finds himself alone in the past, and then back again to 2016, where his techno-paradise has been transformed into the world with which we're sadly familiar today. Can he fix it? Can he bring back to life the planet Earth he came from? Well... you've got two thirds further of the book to find that out.
Within the preposterous genre styling notions of time travel, author Mastai doesn't bother going into too much detail of the science of the thing. This isn't hard sci-fi. Suffice to say his imaginings are fairly internally consistent. There's something else here that Mastai does very well. He takes an impossible notion and hangs a character's journey upon it, one that is emotionally driven and often beautifully realized. The time travel takes its proper place, back seat to a story about love and loss, and one's responsibility to the living over the dead, or those not having lived at all. The author owes a lot here to Kurt Vonnegut, who also had a compelling ability to drape real human feeling over a story of the bizarre and improbable. It isn't quite perfect, and some of his notions drag a bit on the story. (Imagine, for example, if you could travel backwards in time, but were stuck with the human pace of one second per second? Such an idea is intriguing, but it slows down a narrative, let alone the likelihood that it would drive a person completely insane.) Mastai's clipped brief chapters, fast moving tale, comedic humanity, and devotion to the improbable future, still make this book a moving page-turner. Time travel tales are a genre unto themselves, and this one is a welcome addition to the team.