Book Review: The Ministry of Time

 By Kaliane Bradley

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Fantasy, time travel

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Newport, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: The idea of time -- and time travel -- fascinates me  

 *****

    I love the concept of this book -- bringing people from the past into the present -- but its execution was, shall we say, a bit disjointed.

    It has a lot going for it. The writing is decent, with flashes of brilliance. The characters for the most part are diverse and well rounded. Their biographical backgrounds -- and more than one is actually taken from the pages of history -- are compelling.

    Our hero and narrator, who is not named for the bulk of the novel, is an Asian Englishwoman working in the British civil service. She was born in Cambodia and lived through the Khmer Rouge takeover and genocide, survived and moved with her family to the UK and now lives in London. As the book begins, she finds her new job is part of a time travel experiment. Various people from other eras of the British Empire will be brought into the 21st Century. She will be a bridge to help them acclimate to the current time.

    The newcomers will be called expats, rather than refugees, the latter being considered an unflattering term. Our hero, a refugee herself and currently an expert on languages, has mixed feeling about the issue.

    The book never delves into how the theorical impossibility of time travel is overcome. It simply posits that it was found sometime in the future, and the British appropriated the discovery to the current time and place. Precautions are taken to ensure the past is not changed; they are simply bringing people from previous times into the present. "Removing them from the past ought not to impact the future."

    Still, the book is written on various timelines, which can be confusing.

    Anyway, let's start with the good parts: The writing is stunning at times,  including lines like these:

            * "Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions."

            * "My mother ... had witnessed the sort of horrors that changed the way screams sounded."

            * "The wind shook me like a beetle in a matchbox." -- A line I so want to believe is a reference to Melanie's song, Alexander Beetle.

     The book explores the themes of people out of their elements and trying to fit in, often comparing it to the experiences of immigrants and refugees. How they are treated -- as a curiosity, savage, naive or incompetent -- is a constant element.

    There's a story in there that explains what happened, but it's so tangled it's sometime hard to decipher. The author throws in a romance and potential crimes of the past and future. As we move into the climax, it attains the elements of a thriller, as good guys and bad guys (and who are all these people?) battle to take control of whatever needs to be taken control of.

    Yet within that, that actions sometimes grinds to a halt and we are subjected to philosophical meanderings about what it all means.

    So go ahead and enjoy the writing and the story. Just don't try to hard to understand it all.

Book Review: Your Utopia

 By Bora Chung

• Translated by: Anton Hur

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Short Stories

• Where I bought this book: Barnes & Noble, Florence, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I thoroughly enjoyed Cursed Bunny, Chung's first collection of stories 

 ********* 

   Normally, when reviewing a book, I focus on the author's writing, the quality and imagination of the story, and the telling moments that give the book its star rating. A good story, well told, is what I'm looking for.

    But here, I'm just going to let the author's descriptive writing and fierce imagination speak for itself. The following is a snippet from the tale Maria, Gratia Plena, ostensibly about the investigation of a women thought to be a drug dealer. This part is about a dream the investigator has after looking into the woman's thoughts and memories, which included details about the Cassini mission.

         In my dream, I am a planet. A small, unmanned spacecraft comes up to me, circling me. Whenever it moves, its tiny bright lights sparkle. In that vast bleakness that is the black of space, the spacecraft twinkles its little lights and stays by my side. I am a happy planet.

           But a few days after our first encounter, the spacecraft begins to move away. I shout after it.

           "But why?" 

           The spacecraft does not reply. Blinking its tiny little lights that I love so much, it goes farther and farther away.

           "But why? But why?" 

        It pays my pathetic cries no mind as it continues to go farther toward destruction. When it starts to fall into the fires of the sun, I am woken from my sleep.

           My phone is ringing.

    This collection is mostly about life sometime in the future, when intelligent machines dominate our lives. They have emotions, thoughts, and memories. These are their stories.

    It's a strange future, which gives voice to some of our greatest fears about technology, but like Pandora's Jar, it remains oddly full of hope.