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Book notes - Lost in Time, by AG Riddle
Lost in Time, by AG Riddle, is another book masquerading as science fiction but actually basically a mystery / thriller. The sentence and paragraph structure kind of gives it away, lots of short assertions or partial sentences, loosely bunched in very short paragraphs. Every so often AG Riddle forgets this and writes "normally" for a while, and those passages are noticeably better connected and structured. So my guess is that he is a good writer who has been persuaded by his editor or publisher to adopt this different style to appeal to a different readership.
The basic plot looks like it's going to be about a bloke who confesses to a crime he didn't commit. As punishment he gets sent back using a prototype time machine to the late Triassic era, which has rapidly become the method of choice around the world to get rid of dangerous criminals. (The Triassic is presented as a bit tricky to survive in but ultimately not very different to now, which is rather simplistic but serves as a plot device). The machine is called Absolom for no very clear reason, though I assume Riddle is alluding to the David and Absolom story in the Hebrew Bible. The man's scientist and engineer buddies, convinced of his innocence, labour night and day to invent a way to retrieve him. But then the plot switches to his daughter, who becomes the real protagonist while the bloke is kind of sidelined. The daughter has her own complicated angst and temporal history, and she converts the whole Absalom project into a way of rescuing and saving the lives of random specific people through recent (American) history.
The science bit is rather woeful and is better ignored and understood simply as a plot device - we're in the territory of "if we don't do exactly the right thing then there'll be a causality violation and our entire time line will be annihilated". So to avoid this grim fate our heroes decide that if they get any hint that they've been anywhere in the past, they'll ensure that they prepare for and enact said event, whatever it requires. This kind of plot goes back a long way - James Blish wrote a short story called Beep in 1954 (expanded into the short novel The Quincunx of Time in 1973) which did exactly this for future events. But here there is a series of quasi-magical inventions appearing at just the right point in the plot, which become increasingly hard to believe - as mentioned, better not to think in science terms at all and just accept them as ad hoc solutions to the current obstacle.
In the end it turns out that what the daughter is really aiming for is a new society, based on a conveniently uninhabited Pacific island, where she can invite exactly who she wants to share with her. This is done through a bit of technical wizardry and pot-loads of money earned through, for example, prior knowledge of how the financial markets would crash in 2007-8 (the admonition about not changing events in the slightest apparently doesn't apply to this lady earning obscene amounts of money). The climax of this thread reads to a British reader as an extraordinary piece of naivety (or self deception) - "Absalom Island was like the United States of America. A new version... Absalom - the machine itself - was a physical manifestation of the march of humanity. It was a device that removed the worst members of human society and rescued the innocent." The island has no code of laws, no constitution, nothing except for the whim of the founder and her immediate dependants to decide on what behaviours and lifestyles are acceptable. Maybe this resonates with US readers - certainly Riddle apparently sees this as uncritically Utopian - but elsewhere it has a rather chilling resonance.
So on the whole, for me, it fails not only as a piece of science fiction (which I don't think it was ever meant to be), but also as a serious consideration of human society and its development. I would doubt that the story will travel well outside the US - the few examples of who would get rescued by the new Absalom variant are all derived from American events and tropes, except for the Korean inventor of a handy subsidiary gizmo who gets rewarded with the rescue of a family member. Personally I find it hard to believe that a couple of kids in a pioneer wagon on its way west across the emerging US are more deserving than a whole bunch of non-Americans across the world in other circumstances. But in the end it all comes down to the whim of the Absalom team, and the kind of situations that they think of looking for.
The book could, I feel, have been "rescued" in several ways. First, the distraction of the original protagonist being sent back to the Triassic could have been replaced with something much simpler, seeing as how all the later trips were within the last century or so (within the age of photography, basically). But I guess that gives you the lure of dinosaurs as monsters. Secondly (and more importantly) the whole "Utopian social vision" bit was crying out for some critical reflection and recognition of the problems inherent in it. Finally, there was an implicit assumption that if people in difficult situations - which included drug and gambling addictions, loss of close family members, etc - were plucked out of their context and given a new chance, that alone would be enough to "cure" them. There's no real recognition of an internal discourse or world that might be driving behaviour regardless of being moved to a Pacific island. It all feels very superficial.
It's difficult to say who might like it. I guess one could just drift over the surface, enjoy the pacy writing, and not ask questions of the book or feel disturbed by its unexamined assumptions. To that extent it might serve as a holiday or journey book. It's certainly a quick read, and has quite a few different settings and locations that you jump about between. And I strongly suspect that it's written with an American rather than international audience in mind.
Comments
Geez, you left out the important stuff: According to GoodReads (An Amazon Company):
Good review!