Today’s stack includes several books about jumping around in time—not all of them are exactly time travel, but they do involve moving through time in an unconventional manner.
The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard
This story takes place in a valley with an unusual geography: across the mountains to either side of the valley are nearly identical valleys, with a town by a lake. The only difference is that to the east it’s twenty years in the future, and to the west it’s twenty years in the past. Travel between towns is strictly regulated by the Conseil, and usually involves some sort of death—parents coming from the east to visit a long-dead child, or somebody who isn’t expected to live much longer traveling from the west to get a glimpse of their future progeny. In either case, interactions are strictly prohibited, for fear of “annihilation”—a change in the past could completely alter the reality in the future valley.
Odile is in high school, in training to be a conseillère, when she sees some visitors from the east and recognizes them, giving her forbidden knowledge about one of her classmates. Knowing that he will soon die, but that she is not allowed to do anything about it, is a secret that torments her, especially as she grows closer to him.
The concept of this infinite line of valleys, each twenty years apart from the other, makes for a fascinating premise. The structure of the society in the valley is restrictive, not just in regard to travel between valleys but also for life in general. All of the kids in Odile’s class are vying for different jobs, with their futures at stake. Kids who do poorly, particularly those who have had disciplinary issues, often end up as gendarmes, guarding the fence that surrounds the town and monitoring the rare visits between valleys. It also allows for some intriguing plays on memory—like what happens to somebody’s memory of the past two decades if something in the past is changed? How does it affect you to catch a glimpse of your own future? I liked the way that Odile’s knowledge of the future mirrored the way it feels to have something foreshadowed in a book: you know it’s coming but you don’t quite know how it will happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it but wait for it to show up… or is there?
The Day Tripper by James Goodhand
Alex Dean is young and in love, but he’s had some trouble in his past, and has a whole lot of trouble coming in the future. After a drunken fight that almost kills him, he wakes up in a place he doesn’t recognize and eventually discovers that he’s fifteen years older, without having gone to college and working a dead-end job at the pub where he used to sing. Each new day finds him pining for his girlfriend Holly, drinking too much, and waking up the next day with a hangover and no idea when or where he is this time.
The mystery of why Alex is jumping around, seemingly randomly, to different points in his own timeline, is part of what kept me reading the book, because he eventually runs into a mysterious man who hints at having some answers, though he is maddeningly vague for a good portion of the book. It is also very much a book about Alex figuring himself out—both in sorting out his childhood trauma, and making better choices when he finally understands from his older self that he’s an alcoholic. The problem for me was that I just didn’t really like Alex much, and I found his single-minded focus on Holly to be a bit creepy. I feel like it was meant to be romantic, this one true love that he needed to find his way back to, but the truth is that he was not a great person to her even when they were together, and although he does eventually have his hero’s journey and become a better person, it does feel like we should be beyond this cliche of using the loss of a woman (whether through death or through time-jumping) be primarily a source of motivation for a guy.
The Day Tripper reminded me a bit of Oona Out of Order (reviewed here), which also featured a main character who lived her life in a random order, though in Oona’s case she got a year at a time instead of only a single day. That definitely gave her some time to settle into each year of her life, where she could spend some time figuring out what she’d miss and then actually live that year out. For Alex, it’s hard to know how he would have managed an entire lifetime’s worth of day-at-a-time jumps, particularly when it turns out that choices he makes in his younger self can actually modify or entirely undo things that he has already experienced as an older self. (Yeah, there are some weird inconsistencies in some places for sure.)
It had some good potential, but I really found myself hoping that Alex would figure himself out and have a happy ending that somehow did not include getting back together with Holly, simply because I think that would have been a more unexpected but satisfying conclusion. Still, it did keep me guessing where Alex would end up next, and whether he would figure out his unusual situation.
Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá
Reading The Day Tripper made me want to re-read this comic book with a similar title that I read over a decade ago, so I pulled it off the shelf. Daytripper (which I wrote about here) is about Brás de Oliva Domingos, who writes obituaries but has dreams of becoming a writer like his famous father. We read his story out of order as well: at age 32, at age 11, at age 28 … each day is a momentous day in his life, with a strange twist. I found it just as engrossing this time around as I did years ago, with a decade’s worth of additional perspective of my own to bring to my reading. I won’t include more spoilers here—you can read my original write-up if you want to find out more—but it’s a thought-provoking story and well worth a read.
Backtrack Volume 1 by Brian Jones, Jake Elphick, Doug Garbark
I’d read a couple issues of this comic book when it first came out a few years back; this volume collects the first five issues (though there’s more to the story that I haven’t gotten to yet). A group of drivers has been assembled by the mysterious Casper Quellex, who has promised that the winner of the race will be able to go back in time and fix their biggest mistake. Each of the drivers has something in their past that they regret, and is desperate to win, but they soon discover this isn’t an ordinary road race. They soon find themselves driving through time—dodging dinosaurs, encountering horse-drawn chariots, outracing a massive earthquake in 15th century China. One of the racers has done this before and claims to know Quellex, but given that everyone has something to hide, this isn’t a group that’s inclined to trust each other. As the drivers get picked off one by one throughout history, we gradually start to learn a little more about Quellex and his deadly race.
While the story does let us get to know several of the drivers over the course of the story, the focus is Alyson Levy, a former getaway driver who is drinking her days away in a bar after a getaway gone wrong. Each issue, there’s a little bit more revealed about what happened, and why she is so determined to finish this race. I’m curious to see where this story goes next, so I’ll need to look up the next volume!
The Time Traveler’s Guide to Dating by Todd Gilbert, Brandon McKinney, Zachary Brunner, Tom Orzechowski
Here’s another comic from a few years ago that I just read this weekend. Herbert is not happy with his life: he’s been stuck as assistant manager at the big box store Mulligans for five years, watching everyone else get promoted to managing other stores. But he’s been working on a plan, and the Memorial Day Sale is the perfect time to pull it off. Everything is lined up for him to help himself to the cash from the safe—call it five years of unpaid overtime.
How does time travel fit into his plans? Well, they don’t at first. Time travel is somebody else’s project—two wacky government scientists on the other side of town who apparently have a penchant for using top secret technology to cater to their own whims. This time, one of them has invented a toilet that flushes your poo into the past—but the prototype winds up at Mulligans by mistake, setting in motion a very bizarre night for Herbert.
We get a preview of this right at the beginning of the book, before rewinding back to the start to see how it all played out for him. It turns out the toilet sends him back 24 hours, but his original self is still playing out all of the things he did the first time around, oblivious to the growing number of Herberts that are lurking around the store, and not all of them are working toward the same purpose. The “No Alternate Timelines” seal on the cover gives you an indication of the type of time travel involved here: the timeline has to stay consistent, and everything that happens on Herbert’s first trip through the weekend still has to happen even on his second, third, or fifteenth trip through.
How does dating fit in, then? Well, Amy is a new hire for the weekend, chosen primarily for her ability to distract a guard for Herbert’s original plan. But after living through the same weekend multiple times and getting to know Amy a little better, Herbert actually starts to care for her and regrets using her as an alibi for the theft, at which point he tries to undo the damage he’s done. But because of that “no alternate timelines” rule, that’s a bit harder to accomplish.
Overall, I thought it was a clever use of a rewind machine, but I found the relationship between Herbert and Amy a little too easily formed and (later) repaired, considering the way that Amy interacts with various versions of Herbert throughout the same weekend. Every so often the story cuts to the two hapless scientists trying to track down the time-traveling toilet as they wind up having a bizarre adventure of their own. It looks like this one’s a little harder to track down a physical copy, but Amazon has it digitally.
My Current Stack
I’m currently reading one more book that fits with today’s column: The Next Time I Die by Jason Starr. Steven Blitz, a New York attorney, is stabbed while trying to stop a crime … but when he wakes up in the hospital the next day, the world is different: it’s still 2020, but Al Gore is president, Blockbuster is thriving, and he’s a much wealthier man with a daughter he can’t remember. It also appears that he’s not a great guy—he’s apparently having multiple affairs, for one thing. I’m intrigued and I haven’t yet found out what exactly is going on, though I’m not especially excited about the writing itself. It’s taking Blitz a very long time to accept the fact that things are different, and he’s not at all very good at pretending he fits into this new timeline. (And the author seems to have a real obsession with describing people primarily by their weight for some reason.)
I’ve also been reading a few more comics from my list, an academic book about games, and I’ve got another book about artificial intelligence in the queue, so these will all be showing up in some columns hopefully in the near future!
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