Wednesday, August 7, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Psychology of Time Travel: by Kate Mascarenhas




One thing you note about books when you read a lot of them is that book titles can range from being incredibly apt to being completely awful.  In particular, a lot of titles are either incredibly generic - technically being accurate to a book's contents but not really giving a reader any specifics about them - and a few are actually completely misleading.  To be fair, title writing is probably as hard as it can be for genre fiction, with books often being incredibly complex and hard to summarize without spoiling.

Which is all to say that The Psychology of Time Travel is a thankful exception here: the book is indeed very much, if not entirely about, the psychological effects of (fictional) time travel.  Yes, the book is technically a mystery story (Amazon lists it under its category of "LGBT Mystery" which is hilariously missing the point), but the book uses its structure - jumping between many character perspectives and timelines to examine the different ways that time travel in a universe in which events are fixed in time affects the minds of those involved, directly or indirectly.  And it's a fascinating novel all the way through, from beginning to ending, as it indeed explores all of these issues through characters whose developments we witness in not quite chronological order. 



----------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
1967:  A quartet of women in Britain - Margaret, Lucille, Grace, and Barbara - invent a machine that allows for time travel to any time period in which the machine already exists.  When the group makes their press release to announce the discovery to the world, Barbara seems to have a mental breakdown.  Soon, she is frozen out of the group and the other three, under Margaret's leadership, continue to develop the Time Travel program without her, with Margaret especially looking into psychological means to prevent an "embarrassment" like Barbara from ever again joining the program.

2017: The Time Travel program has been active for 50 years, an Barbara's granddaughter Ruby is visiting her grandma when the two receive a package from Grace telling of a date when someone will die: January 2018.  Bothered, Ruby begins to take steps to try and find out if the date is in fact her grandmother's death in the future, while her grandmother Barbara is at the same time encouraged to make one last attempt to rejoin the time travel project.

2018:  A mixed-race woman named Odette visits a museum only to find an impossible scene: a woman dead on the ground, killed in such a way so as to be unidentifiable, with seemingly no culprit in sight.  Chilled by the sight, and spurred by a psychologist she meets nearby at the scene, a woman named Ruby, Odette resolves to try and figure out this mystery and her investigation leads her to the time travel program....whose members are far stranger in mind than she could've imagined...
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As I mentioned above the jump: this book is indeed in large part an examination of the psychology of people involved - either directly or peripherally - with time travel, which the book explores through jumping back and forth through time and perspectives as it unravels its central "mysteries."  I use the quotation marks there because none of the central mysteries - who died in January 2018?  who killed them?  why did Grace send Ruby and Barbara the box? - are particularly hard to guess and the book makes little effort to conceal the answers, although it does leave the reader guessing a little bit as to the "hows" involved.

I should point out first the rules of time travel here: this is time travel where you can only go back and forth to times when time travel exists, and where changing anything via time travel is impossible.   Thus there are no paradoxes possible; however, time travel is still useful for business and governmental purposes like information gathering, but the ability to gather such information along the timeline, particularly personal information - especially as there are no problems with different time versions of oneself interacting - has serious psychological implications for time travelers: how do you deal with knowing the date and means of your own death?  How do you deal with knowing the person with whom you're fated to marry and grow attached with before you even meet them, and if you know ahead of time, are you getting attached to them because of real attraction or just because fate says you should?  How do you deal with the deaths of loved ones when you can always travel back in time to when those people are still alive?  I'm leaving out some of the interesting questions explored here, because these are just a few that come to mind.

The book explores these questions through the many many characters involved in this story.  Odette and Ruby are our main perspectives we come back to, but the book also jumps to quite a few other perspectives - that of Fay in various time periods as she joins the program and becomes a lot more jaded through her experiences - that of Grace as she interacts with a character and begins a relationship seemingly at first due to her own future knowledge - and quite a few others.  And for even the smallest characters, the book does a fascinating job making these characters feel very real and understandable, with the two major ones - Ruby and Odette - being particularly interesting to read about.  The book never feels spread too thin in terms of characters, with it never feeling particularly odd to jump back and forth even as cliffhangers abound.

The book's not perfect - again, you can see some things coming quite clearly from fairly early on, and the resolution of one plot point is kind of silly and ridiculous*.  Still, it's pretty damn good and fascinating throughout, and ends in a very satisfying way.  Definitely worth your time, if not highly recommended.

*Spoiler in ROT13: Ehol'f gevny haqre gur Pbapynir rffragvnyyl nfxf ure gb erpvgr gur erfcbafrf va n obbx, juvpu qbrfa'g frrz gb znxr nal frafr rkprcg nf gb or fbzrguvat Ehol pna rnfvyl nppbzcyvfu?
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