James is a Chronoman, one of the elite few who travel
back through time to try and salvage what he can for a broken present without disrupting
the timeline. It’s a thankless, desperate soul destroying job that only seems
to postpone the inevitable – and James is sure he cannot endure much longer
Until, in the past, he meets Elise and does the
unthinkable – he brings her to the present. He breaks the most fundamental time
law and now he is a fugitive pursued by his own agency and worse, one of the
most powerful mega-corporations in the solar system who have their own
nefarious agenda.
But Elise brings with her something even more precious -
hope
I love the world building of this book – it’s a truly
fascinating dystopian world where the people of our far distant and ruined
future are using time travel to literally mine their past for the resources
they need to keep the future functioning.
I love the whole concept of the time laws – ways to
remove things from the past, to claim resources and items, without actually
disrupting the time stream. Inevitably that means hastily grabbing items before
massive disasters and catastrophes, taking things that would be destroyed
anyway so the time line isn’t disrupted.
There’s a wonderful theme of how decayed everything is becoming in this book which is done excellently in two ways. Firstly, we have the very overt descriptions of just how terrible things are. A lot of these are from James’s memories of his life in brutal refugee camps and his experiences of other times. We then have Elise with her very overt horror over what the world has become, how destroyed the Earth is, how things she took for granted as basic items of life have now been all but lost to the ravaged
But this first track is underpinned more subtly by the
lots of little hints that things are getting worse, resources are getting more
stretched – from the lack of chronomen each year, to the sheer desperation of
having to send people back in time to harvest things like wood, to the fact
each time and place can only ever be used once. We clearly see that the
desperate temporary measures they’ve taken to try and keep humanity going are
not going to last forever. It adds together and really informs the plot by
adding not just the “everything is terrible” which is common in dystopians but
also, with excellent subtlety, pushing the addition sense that “and it’s all
going to get so much worse.”
This really does affect the whole story – the despair of
the Chronomen becomes so much more apparently when you realise they’re swimming
up stream and losing ground. Levin’s epic nobility and rigid following of the
rules seems all the more pure – and all the more pointless – when we see the
state of the world. Valta corporation’s ongoing greed and appalling
self-interest seems all the more small minded and destructive in the light of
this despair.
