James Nicoll Reviews

Kate Mascarenhas’ 2018 The Psychology of Time Travel is a time travel murder mystery.

In 1967, four geniuses—Margaret Norton, Barbara "Bee" Hereford, Grace Taylor, and Lucille Waters—emerged from their Cumbrian laboratory and presented the world with a functioning time travel machine.

Margaret, Lucille, and Grace founded the Conclave, “an elite quango with responsibility for all time travel missions.” Margaret graciously accepted the position of director; a position she would ruthlessly cling to for the rest of her life. Her colleagues accepted positions within the Conclave suitable to their lofty status (but less than Margaret’s).

As for poor Barbara…

Barbara was the victim of two misfortunes. First, that she was among the small number of people who suffer psychological injury from time travel. Second, that this issue manifested during the group’s first press conference. The press conference, intended to be a triumph, was instead an embarrassment as Barbara babbled nonsense.

Obviously, the Conclave couldn’t have an embarrassment on staff. In any case it would be cruel to Barbara to expose her to phenomena that might injure her. Therefore, Margaret orchestrated Barbara’s ejection from the group… keeping Barbara’s pet rabbit for herself. This act of selfless kindness was followed up by the institution of comprehensively ableist recruitment criteria, to avoid further embarrassment.

Fifty years later, the Conclave is a power unto itself. Barbara is just Ruby Rebello’s Granny Bee.

Quango member Grace sends Bee an origami rabbit made from a folded coroner’s report dated six months in the future. The name of the deceased is not specified. The age is stated as eighty, Bee’s age. Could the dead woman be Bee? Why did Grace send the rabbit?

Bee takes the rabbit as a reminder that life is short. She would like one more time travel trip before she dies. Ruby promises to help Bee with her quest… a promise that requires Ruby to infiltrate the Conclave.

Six months later, a dead woman is found in a locked room. Cause of death is in no way mysterious: she has been riddled with bullets. Her identity, who orchestrated her death, how they accomplished this in a room locked from the inside, are all mysteries to be solved. Or perhaps, arranged.

~oOo~

This is the sort of time travel that requires machinery at both ends of the trip. Consequently, nobody can travel to any period before the invention of time travel, nor can they travel to any place or time where there isn’t a machine As well, nobody can travel past 2267, for reasons that are unclear. To quote:

It was almost as if the supporting infrastructure disappeared in 2267.

Maybe civilization collapsed! Or maybe people decided in 2267 that the toxic effects of time travel outweighed the benefits. Or maybe, because history is fixed, people stopped facilitating time machines in 2267 because they knew they stopped facilitating time machines in 2267¹.

In any case, the solution to the dead woman in the locked room isn’t that someone’s time machine materialized, the occupant shot the dead women, and then the killer tardised away. That said, the solution will be obvious to readers as soon as the enabling mechanism is mentioned.

The plot is enabled by two different but interrelated toxic phenomena.

First, time travel often has a corrosive effect on travelers. Many become alienated and all of them come to accept that certain events (such as individual deaths or the devolution of the UK into an unpleasant-sounding theocracy) cannot be altered. Therefore, travelers will enter machines they know are fated to explode and feel a sense of relief as fate is fulfilled.

Second, Margaret is a terrible person who becomes worse with age. Accordingly, the workplace she creates is an exercise in ableist sadism in the name of necessity. Although Margaret is mortal, time travel means she rules the Conclave from 1967 to 2267, which means that any reform is nearly impossible. Which is bad.

Mascarenhas’ version of time travel asserts that history is fixed; however, her novel’s history is not the history that we know. Does that mean history is not fixed? Perhaps the Conclave managed to create an unpleasant island of historical stability? Or is there something else going on?

While the means by which the death occurred is not terribly mysterious, the means by which the event was orchestrated is pleasingly obscure. As well, Mascarenhas amusingly recounts the complex interplay between a bunch of vividly realized characters². Readers will be entertained.

The Psychology of Time Travel is available here (Crooked Lane Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), here (Words Worth Books).

1: Is it significant that time travel is revealed on Canada’s first centenary and vanishes on its 400^th birthday? Unclear, as Canada is only mentioned once, as a place one might visit during a holiday. As for the US, it is only referenced as an accent. I am as much a fan of contrived inclusions of USA delenda est as the next Canadian, but the tight focus of British SF on the UK makes that challenging.

2: Almost all of whom are women. No doubt the absence of male characters has no great significance, perhaps none whatsoever. To borrow a line of reasoning from Vertex, it’s simply that this novel’s themes do not call for men to take a lead role. This merely shows that the author prefers cerebral plots, not that the author is anti-men.

You can ask for a link to the relevant Vertex issues, but you won’t get it. I blame the deplorable state of the Internet Archive in the early 1970s. It’s also surprisingly difficult, as I have discovered before, to find online discussions of the conversation I am referencing. In fact, the easier place to search, at least for me, is More Words, Deeper Hole.