The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

Mike Ashley
The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF Cover

The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

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4/28/2019
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This anthology is somewhat of a mixed bag, with some excellent stories, quite a few decent and interesting stories, and some stories which I thought would have been far better omitted.

The standout of the 25 stories here is the exceptional Walk to the Full Moon, a novella by Sean McMullen about a genetic branch of the ancestors of humans, who developed a unique skill.

Other excellent stories are "Time Gypsy" by Ellen Klages (despite its unfortunate title), about a grad student in quantum physics who makes the most of a once-in-a-lifetime time-travel opportunity; "After-Images" by Malcolm Edwards, about an English community trapped in a time-slowed vortex; "Legions in Time" by Michael Swanwick, about a woman hired to guard a time-travel device; "Darwin's Suitcase" by Elisabeth Malartre, in which a time traveller attempts to prevent a religious overreaction to one of Darwin's works which eventually resulted in an oppressive Age of Darkness; and "Traveller's Rest", in which the planet is enmeshed in an interminable war through a barrier of graduated differential time-lapse zones.

"The Chronology Protection Case" by Paul Levinson is an interesting and chilling story which is unfortunately marred by the male character's fixation on the women he encounters, rendering them objects for his desire rather than human beings in their own right.

"The Pusher" by John Varley is a poignant story because of the time differential of space travel and the lengths to which the main character goes in order to compensate for it. This is a clever idea: something which seems very obvious and sinister, turning out to be something entirely different and not-so-sinister. However, seen through the lens of almost 40 years later, the creepiness and psychologically-predatory nature of what actually happens does not seem so clever any more. It's worth reading, but very much "of its time".

"Palely Loitering" by Christopher Priest is a time paradox story about a self-absorbed man who goes back to give himself as a child a lifelong obsession with a woman he professes to love but doesn't actually know. It's a great pity that the author did not do something more interesting with the intriguing and inventive worldbuilding in which the story is set.

"Coming Back", a short story by Damien Broderick about a physics grad student trapped in a time vortex, should almost certainly be avoided due to its portrayals of assault and rape by a main character whose Groundhog-Day repeats permit him to learn to simulate being a decent person in order to get what he wants, while never growing out of the vile human being that he actually is.

With a few exceptions, this volume provides a wide and interesting variety of the different types of time-travel stories, and is definitely worth the read.