Reviews with content warning for Cancer - The Psychology of Time Travel

The Psychology of Time Travel has some of the tightest writing I’ve ever read. Given that it’s a book about time travel, that was absolutely vital!

Kate Mascarenhas somehow wrote a book about a mystery that gives you all of the information you would typically get in a trial without the trial. She also writes an incredibly tight time travel system with a closed loop (my favorite kind!) and clear rules for what is and isn’t possible. The passage of information from different versions of the same person is also done very well, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of the time travel aspects of the book!

What I didn’t like as much was the Ruby timeline, specifically toward the end of the book

with her romantic relationship with Grace

It felt a bit rushed, and I wish there had been even ten more pages of development.

All in all this book was really well written, but I don’t know if I was the target reader. The first half was really hard for me to get through, but once I did I flew through the second half. I think that because there was so much set up, and so many different chronologies to follow, it made it difficult for me to get invested in the book. I think this would make a really interesting miniseries, and that the visual medium would help convey where in time we are more easily than the chapter headings do.

Unrelated to anything that’s actually related to the writing or story, but all of the characters in the book were women and seeing a STEM field full of women made me so happy!

Would I recommend this book? Yes. Will I read it again? Probably not. 3.75 stars.

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thequiltyreader's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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cheye13's review

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adventurous hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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norwegianforestreader's review

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dark emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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aplanetarymind's review

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adventurous emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.0

A very enjoyable read, with a certain twist in classic time travel stories that gives it an excellent character focus. Indeed this book is almost a character study of several personalities, with a highly readable style of writing.

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tachyondecay's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

From women writing subversive TV now to women inventing time travel! The Pyschology of Time Travel is a quirky part mystery, part love story. As the title suggests, Kate Mascarenhas focuses more so on what it would be like to be a time traveller rather than on the social, historical, or future repercussions of mucking about with a timeline. Along with bringing up the usual questions of free will versus determinism, etc., this book seeks to address such burning queries as: what would you call it if you had sex with your future or past self, and is that cheating? I’m being tongue-in-cheek—there is a lot of serious, weird stuff in this book. But my overall impression is that there were better stories that could be told here.

There are two main characters: Ruby and Odette. Ruby is the granddaughter of Barbara, one of the four women who invented time travel in the 1960s. Barbara fell out with her fellow inventors after she had a breakdown on national television, so Ruby and her mother have always lived at a distance from the world of time travel. This changes in big ways, for a mysterious note from the future prompts Ruby to look into the Time Travel Conclave. Odette, on the other hand, thinks the Conclave holds the answer to what killed a dead woman she discovered in the basement of a museum. She joins up to look for those answers, but of course, the reality is much more wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey!

Mascarenhas follows a block time, self-consistent approach to time travel: if you know the future, you are doomed to complete it, no paradoxes allowed. She delves a little into what this does to time travellers’ attitudes towards deaths of loved ones—how do you grieve someone who is accessible to you by travelling to the past? Similarly, how do you live a life when you know the outcome—your date of death, how you die, who your friends and partners are at that time? We humans are so accustomed to the linearity of our time, and to the arrow of time being such that we know our past absolutely yet our future in no true sense—what would time travel, really, do to us? (It seems strange to me that Ruby is a therapist, yet she spends little enough time ruminating on this herself.) I, for one, do not want to know how or when I die. I like that uncertainty.

Time travel affects more than just romantic relationships. The relationships people have with Margaret Norton, the Conclave’s inaugural director, are an interesting example. Apparently she gets nastier as she gets older, and many characters remark that they prefer dealing with her younger selves. What would a job be like if you could talk to your boss across different time periods?

Mascarenhas never actually takes us on a time travel adventure. She offers up interesting tidbits on how our society has evolved after a few centuries of time travel. Perhaps the most tantalizing is that it’s impossible to travel beyond 2267, as if the time travel machines just disappear after that. Oooh, what a cool mystery! But that’s never brought up again—and in a weird continuity error any editor should have caught, they keep mentioning how time travel justice is inspired by “twenty-fourth century British law,” even though the 2267 cap is in the twenty-third century. Oops.

Speaking of errors, I’m not sure if this is a stylistic faux pas or a typesetting issue, but the dialogue habitually runs together—the speaker changing mid-paragraph. This kind of thing annoys the hell out of me, and honestly there were moments I wanted to put down this book simply because of that habit.

So, in short, this book could have used another editing pass, I think.

The main plots are all well and good, but in the end I guess I was just hoping for more after that set-up. I feel like there are more stories, better stories, more interesting stories happening here, yet we are on the periphery looking inwards with Ruby and Odette. Furthermore, while I give Mascarenhas due credit for attempting to use her time travel framework to tell the story in a non-linear yet comprehensive way, I wish she had taken more risks. I wonder if this is because this book attempts to be a more “literary” approach to time travel? In any case, The Pyschology of Time Travel has a great premise, but the story itself and the characters within fall flat for me.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

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