Book Review: Forbidden Future

Forbidden Future: A Time Traveler Anthology from Masquerade Publishing is a wonderful short story collection that takes seven slices at the mind-bending subject of time travel.

While each story is an inventive little gem in itself, the title suggests a dark future, somewhere on a sliding scale between dystopia and  bio-engineered ignorance.

If you wonder why no one chooses to visit the past, check out the title story, Forbidden Future, by James Wymore, for one possible explanation.  We meet O’Brien at the start of his shift as a night janitor for a government-funded time travel project. Middle-aged O’Brien’s life has settled into an uncomfortable routine: dead-end job, failing marriage and expanding waistline. His only solace is the nights he spends with his beloved time machine. Although the machine is capable of going into the future, this feature is blocked by the most mundane of objects — a screw drilled into the control panel. On the icy night when we meet hapless O’Brien, he is served with divorce papers and learns of budget cuts that threaten to take his job. With nothing to lose, he removes the screw and goes in search of a better future.

Let’s just say things are never as bad as they seem in the present tense.

On the other hand, if you don’t like your dystopian future, you can always come home again. You might even want to bring someone with you. In Society by Terra Harmony (is that a great name for a sci-fi writer, or what?), we get to do just that. Author Harmony’s protagonist volunteers to travel forward in time to take dirt samples of a ecologically-failed world. While there he is picked up by a Society scouting mission screening the hordes of doomed humanity for healthy specimens. Only the healthy are allowed off-planet where they are subjected to an in-depth testing prior to being admitted to the Society. What happens if you don’t test out once you’ve been transported off the planet surface? You know the old saw: in space no one can hear you scream.

In Jump by Jon Bradbury we get treated to a time-traveling cop on a mission to find his fiancee, Violet, who vanished without a trace the day before their wedding. Jesse, jilted groom and FBI Special Agent, has only one clue: the day she disappeared, she answered an ad to try to make some extra money. He finds more than he bargained for when he goes undercover.

My favorite of the collection had to be The Mountains Haven’t by Kade Anderson. In the dueling voices of Julia and Eliza, we are taken to a world where past and present merge in “time loops” and ancestors become predecessors. I got so wrapped up in Anderson’s personalized voices that I did not see the ending coming.

I love it when that happens.