While I was processing books today at work one of them caught my attention. It was called Rewrite, Loops In Time by Gregory Benford. Benford wrote one of my favourite scifi novels, Timescape, way back in 1980, and it turns out this is a belated sequel. The book was on hold for another patron, so I put myself in the queue for the next reservation. It looks quite exciting, going by the blurb. Since it’s a sequel it seems like a good time to return to the original to get myself up to speed. So I guess I know what my next reading adventure is – I’m reading Timescape again!
I started re-reading Gregory Benford’s Timescape, as I mentioned I would yesterday. What strikes me this time is how much the story reminds me of Isaac Asimov‘s The God’s Themselves. The two connecting timelines he writes about are like the two connecting dimensions or universes Asimov wrote about in that book. Benford, a practicing astrophysicist, wrote a terrific sequel to Asimov’s Foundation books, Foundation’s Fear, and is clearly immersed in that lore. But, sorry Isaac, he’s a much better writer, especially when it comes to characters. His writing is so measured and attuned to the details of ordinary life – although what he’s writing about is an extraordinary situation. Revelations about what is happening come about through mundane conversations and passing descriptions. He doesn’t hit the reader over the head with exposition. I’m really enjoying settling in on this ride again, before I get into the sequel.
I’m over half-way now. There are lots of details I don’t remember from the first time I read it. Some chapters seem to veer off from the story, they feature domestic details about the character’s lives with hardly any mention of either the ongoing crisis in 1998, or the efforts to communicate with the past in 1962. There’s an interesting detail in a restaurant dinner scene in the 1960s storyline where main character Gordon’s girlfriend, Penny, mentions Philip Dick’s excellent novel The Man in the High Castle. It’s a pointed, and very meta, reference to the idea of split timelines that features in that novel. It got me thinking that the author, Gregory Benford, is inserting subtle hints that the characters’ timeline in the future is changing. Benford’s characters wrestle with the possibility of paradoxes and ways of overcoming them, and his solutions to them are intriguing – if not always completely comprehensible. It’s a good book. I’m looking forward to reading the new sequel.
I finished the novel Timescape by Gregory Benford tonight. What a good read, my second time around. It’s one of those novels where the story structure is such, with little revealing details piling up, that by the last fifty or so pages you are completely rivetted. It was like that for me: I did the last seventy or so pages in this last sitting. The central conceit of the novel, that scientists from a plagued future might be able to warn scientists in the past and thus save their own timeline, is irresistible. Some of the characters were more interesting and well-rounded than others: such as Gordon Bernstein, the scientist from 1962 trying to decipher the cryptic messages from the future; and Ian Peterson, the womanising bureaucrat helping the scientists of 1998 get the funding and equipment they need to send their messages. The earlier storyline, set in 1962/3, adds a take on the JFK assassination that I wasn’t sure was too necessary, but it was a fun detail anyway. Benford, who is a working scientist, has a feel for time travel paradoxes that leaves most time travel yarns in the dirt. A splendid read, and I can’t wait for the coming sequel.
The novel I have on hold, Rewrite by Gregory Benford, happened to come into the library I was working at today. I redirected it back to this library on the system, scanned it, and it was mine. Yay! Having a closer look at the blurb I saw it was not actually a sequel to his much earlier novel, Timescape, which I read recently, it was what one reviewer called ‘a thematic companion’ to it. Meaning, like Timescape, it’s about time travel. But the time travel mechanic in this one is far less scientific. Our hero Charlie Moment (what a damn literal Dickensian surname!) travels back in time when he gets hit by a truck and dies. Yes, Benford actually uses that old Isekai trope from so many Japanese anime and manga stories. So it seems more isekai than scifi at this early stage. Benford’s clearly having fun with the idea – his character wakes up in his seventeen year old body in 1968. I hope I do too.
I’m still reading Rewrite by Gregory Benford, and it’s going places time travel books don’t usually go. Benford’s breaking the fourth wall by including himself and even his twin brother in the narrative. Main character, Charlie, reads about Benford’s book Timescape and seeks him out for science advice about his situation (unstuck in time). This is the sort of silliness Robert Heinlein did in his later years (try reading Number of the Beast), though Benford does it so much better. The blurb tells me Heinlein’s due to show up in this one soon! Audacious, cheeky!
I’m still reading the Gregory Benford scifi book, Rewrite. Author Robert Heinlein and his wife Ginny have entered the narrative. His novel The Number of the Beast was even mentioned. The Heinleins come off like they appeared to have been in real life – paranoid fruit loops. It’s all wacky meta fun, but I’m not really liking the turn it’s taking with the main character, Charlie. He’s now a Hollywood film-maker and has discovered he’s what’s called a ‘reincarnate’ – someone who can live other lives in the past. So he’s making a new parallel history version of the Michael J Fox film Back To the Future in hopes of flushing out other reincarnates, who will intuit his message from the film. This doesn’t really make sense to me. I’ll stick with it, though, in hopes the book will finally make some sense before the end, but I’m not loving this pseudo-science direction it’s taking. Benford’s other time travel book, Timescape, was full of such arresting hard science. What happened?
I finished reading the Gregory Benford novel, ReWrite. I was a bit disappointed by it overall. Main character, Charlie, skips through different timelines that take him back to his sixteenth year in 1968 each time, learning more about himself and his world with each iteration. The book feels like it’s at its best when it forgets it’s a time travel story, during Charlie’s sojourn in Hollywood, where he becomes a successful film-maker. This section’s wry and funny and threw me for a bit of a loop it was so unexpected. I liked Benford’s playing with alternate timelines. He doesn’t do that single timeline bullshit. In Benford’s time physics you go back in time, you land in a whole new timeline, and there is no paradox.
(Spoiler alert) On the last time-skip Charlie decides to stop the assassination of Martin Luther King, which possibly also saves Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated later in the year (‘possibly’ because in Benford’s story the assassin is the same person). It’s a nice idea, going back in time to save someone – I did it myself with a story called The Butterfly Breeze. But it’s a big ask to think that saving MLK or RFK would lead to a better world, which is Charlie’s aim. At best it’s a wildly optimistic and naive assumption that doesn’t delve into all the structural problems in society that make it what it is. In any case, it’s not the point, and I’m pretty sure Benford knows this too (he’s humoring his character). The important outcome is that Charlie gets to go home to his family, bruised and battered, but filled with hard-won understanding and compassion, and a resolve to make things better for them.