306 pages
English language
Published Nov. 24, 2013 by Soho Press.
Wearying of endless visits to the myriad points of human history, a time traveler attends his own one-hundredth birthday celebration every year with other versions of himself and encounters in his thirty-ninth year his murdered forty-year-old body, a situation that compels him to prevent his own death.
This book had a truly original premise. On the whole I enjoyed the story, though sometimes it was a little confusing to follow.
The idea behind this book sounds great, the synopsis, when I sent it to two people, got an instant "I want to read that" response from both. Add my own desire to dive in and you've got a pretty convincing book jacket...
Unfortunately, the way the description paints the picture is rather different from the story. You go in expecting humour, expecting paradox and interesting time conflicts, and a damn good party - and things fail on all those counts and several others to boot.
There is an interesting sense of a future world, but none of it is explained satisfactorily. There's potential in the time travel, but any guessing games about what must happen because it already has or what needs to happen to make something else happen that needs to because it already did; the lifeblood of this sort of thing, is conveniently avoided by the concept of …
The idea behind this book sounds great, the synopsis, when I sent it to two people, got an instant "I want to read that" response from both. Add my own desire to dive in and you've got a pretty convincing book jacket...
Unfortunately, the way the description paints the picture is rather different from the story. You go in expecting humour, expecting paradox and interesting time conflicts, and a damn good party - and things fail on all those counts and several others to boot.
There is an interesting sense of a future world, but none of it is explained satisfactorily. There's potential in the time travel, but any guessing games about what must happen because it already has or what needs to happen to make something else happen that needs to because it already did; the lifeblood of this sort of thing, is conveniently avoided by the concept of untethering - i.e. that the current "him" of the work does something to divorce himself from the other "Hims", rendering any actions he may or may not choose to pursue moot.
It's cerebral, to a point. Interesting, perhaps requiring a degree of cognitive capacity I was unprepared to invest. But By any measure, it's way overpriced for its size and even more so for its potential. Sorry, Sean.
