Time travel. The ability to change the past. It never gets old (sorry, couldn't resist).
Still, as author Nick Cole reminds us in the Foreword to Synchronic: 13 tales of Time Travel looking back is part of the human condition, an unquenchable desire to address the unanswerable question: what if I had just…? There is probably no richer—or more cliched—subject in science fiction. But with the topic in the capable hands of this talented collection of writers and you will not be disappointed.
Take Susan Kaye Quinn’s story, Corrections. A therapist, working for the Dept of Corrections, guides convicted killers back in time to stop the murders before they happen, a process called the Shift. It’s a tricky business, you have to warp the timeline just enough to prevent the murder, but, too much and snap – extinction for the unlucky inmate. If you’re successful, you get a tag and a chance to live your life as a free man. If not, you'll never have existed. I have a feeling this one might become a new Debt Collector-style series?
Contrast that with Nick Cole’s The Swimming Pool of the Universe. Alternately hilarious and heart-breaking, Private Dexter Keith is caught in the temporal soup of his own brain where the past, future and present collide in a wonderful mash-up of flashbacks. The voice of Sergeant Collins, a computer program/drill instructor implanted into his brain during basic training, provides the lifeline Keith needs to take control of his life.
Swimming Pool has a hopeful ending, but not so for Reset by MeiLin Miranda. Reset asks the question: What if you lived your life over and over, from teenager to fifty years old? On the face of it, it sounds great. You can fix any mistake you ever made! Sucky prom date? Marriage didn’t work out? Problem solved. But what about the parts of your life that you cherish? The relationships, the kids, the love of your life…they just vanish overnight; no mourning, no legacy, just gone. Catherine is haunted by the children of her past lives, drawing them over and over, filling boxes with portraits that exist only in her mind.
But maybe you prefer old school time travel? The kind where para-military time police travel back to stop bad guys who have no regard for the chronological order of our present timeline.Then you want to dip into Edward W Robertson‘s The First Cut. Our fearless, first person hero, fresh from training, arrives in the Cutting Room for assignment as a rookie time cop. Things don’t go well for new-guy in the simulations—he’s barely making the grade—when one of his classmates goes rogue. Think Time Cop meets Houdini.
When I read Rock or Shell by Ann Christy, I had a mental image of the sequence from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods where Shadow gets taken “behind the scenes.” It’s like an MS-DOS version of the world, stripped down, functional, but not pretty in any way. In Christy’s world, an inanimate object—a rock or a shell, for instance—given to a person by a mysterious stranger gives them the ability to change events in their life. The problem is the objects reacts to the thousands of urges, regrets and random thoughts that race through our brains. The end result is an apocalyptic landscape. But wait, all we have to do is wish for it to go back, right? Well, it’s not that simple…
Synchronic, a wonderful collection for you to pass the time (Yeah, I know, but it's my review and I'll pun if I want to!)
David Bruns is a speculative fiction writer from Minnesota, and creator of The Dream Guild Chronicles. Check out his website for updates, new releases and a free short story.
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