Nothing new except the absence of mythical beasts or magic/religion, although there is a bit of that toward the end since a world without science has to explain stuff somehow.Īnyway, if you’re a huge fan of either science fiction or fantasy, this book might ring your bells, but I can also see how it might really bug you, too, because it does have an “author is so clever” aspect about it and it probably does borrow heavily from books in both genres. It’s pastoral, slightly Utopian and a sharp contrast with the world Angela comes from. In terms of the fantasy world it’s agrarian as you would expect and it has lords and ladies, pre-industrial revolution technology and similar trappings.
There are also the equivalent of the Pleblands the spaces between compounds where societal rejects are corralled. It reminded me a bit of Oryx & Crake in terms of corporate compounds and how some are better than others. Angela’s world is satisfyingly horrible, hierarchical and rigid in its governance. There’s a lot of explanation about how Angela’s machine works and what the difference is between travel to parallel universes and time travel. Not being an aficionado of either genre, I think both the fantasy and the science fiction parts worked. I wonder if different editions got different situations to document time travel issues and outcomes. It’s an interesting choice, but since I’m American it worked. Kennedy and the threat of nuclear war with Cuba. One thing that’s interesting is that while Pears is English, he chose to hinge a lot of the time travel variables on US history specifically Richard Nixon v. There is a lot going on and I took notes just so I could relax into the story and not worry about who was who and what was what. If you don’t like “author is so clever” books, skip it.Īlso skip it if you can’t keep a lot of stuff straight - characters, their relationships, time frames, allegoric parallels, backstory, etc. It’s the kind of clever plotting that, if you like this kind of thing, will light up your brain when you discover exactly how things/people are related. It’s neat though and almost everything checks up well. Sometimes more than connects the situations, characters and events sort of fold over and become enmeshed. I can’t really blame the author though because there were so many time and storylines to finish. That said, I don’t think being confined to a single ending was a drawback, although there is one big hole in the plot that kept this from being a 5-star book for me.Īnother thing that kept it a 4-star book was that it dragged out a little too long in the final third.
I think the ebook has multiple endings and some other features that are harder to do as a physical book, and one of these days I’ll try it that way if I see a sale copy somewhere. Show More wrote this book to be read electronically, I decided to get the hardcover.
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