/lit/ - Literature

>>22366203
In 2080, the final human generation is dying out. The world is no longer habitable. A tipping point of no return was reached around 2050. Research into time travel had long been underway. The scientists, under the auspices of the last remaining authority, The World Health Organization, have recruited five individuals to travel back in time from their base in Antartica. The protagonist, a 71 year old Russian woman, is the first to time travel by sending her consciousness back in time to pilot a woman in around 2030, 50 years ago. The question remains of whether altering the past to save the present will doom the future.

I appreciated the detailed explanation of how any of this could be even theoretically possible. There are many different ways presented in media of how time travel functions and I find their comparisons interesting. The narrative has a few twists and surprises, mostly resulting from the alternation of being told from the present and past. Time travel shenanigans are present, though they're easily understood. For some the the largest problem may be in how anticlimactic it may seem to be. I found that to be rather amusing and certainly the best usage I've seen of Reynolds suddenly skipping stuff and not writing any of it. Unlike much else of Reynolds's work there's only a minimal amount of body horror, the weird, and identity problems. This novella could possibly be considered significantly divergent from his usual work.

What I'm most surprised by in this standalone near future SF thriller novella is that Reynolds wrote something that doesn't need to be reduced in length. That hasn't been the case for anything other than the shortest fiction I've read from him. It also reads better to me than most else I've read from him. As a probably unrelated note this was published the year before Tenet, the movie, screened in theaters. There's not that much similarity between them aside from both being time travel thrillers where much doesn't go as planned. I enjoyed this more than Tenet, which was far more concerned with coolness than science. That's nice and all, but it didn't work out that well to me, unlike Permafrost. There are also some similarities with the videogame series, Zero Escape.

Somehow this novella is now what I've personally enjoyed most of what Reynolds has written at of least novella length. He has a few works of short fiction I've enjoyed more. Inversion would've been better if it weren't so repetitive and hadn't gone so wrong. So, this being the best isn't a high bar for an author that I initially rejected, then tried again at the urging of someone, and have since then found to be decent overall. Apparently I prefer his near future work to his far future space opera, though I don't believe that would be the same for the vast majority of those who read him. I hope he does more that's similar to this. I'll be reading more from him regardless.

Rating: 3.5/5