Time travel - you bet your life

kw: book reviews, science fiction, time travel, paradoxes

Intellectual roller coasters I can handle. This one swept hither and yon with great abandon, but I suspect the author had to plan it out carefully beforehand. Most of the short chapters (what some call pericopes) have a date and time attached. In ChronoSpace, by Allen Steele, you need that kind of scorecard to keep your head on straight.

There is another, subtler indication. The dated references also have a day attached. I noticed an anomaly early on: a certain January 14 was noted as a Monday, then a few chapters later January 16 of the same year is also denoted a Monday. I put all the dates into Excel and used its date formatting to show the day. Then I found it easier to tell when things were on an alternate timeline. There is also one blunder, a date in 1997 that really ought to read 1998.

OK, with that aside, the book is a great piece of hard SciFi, in that it proposes a time travel mechanism based on general relativity. It is also an exploration of the idea that, sooner or later, if time travel were ever achieved, it would be much more potentially devastating than thermonuclear weapons.

At the crux of the story is a certain Dr. Murphy, who appears in at least three timelines, and in all three he is the fulcrum about which the timeways pivot. I am quite pleased with the way the author resolves the central dilemma, compared to two or three alternatives I thought of as I read along. Just a tiny spoiler: Murphy doesn't have to die or be annihilated.

What I find is that the author is making an argument in favor of free will, which genuine time travel would seem to threaten. Fermi's argument is still valid: if there are time travelers, where are they?