I read this whole weird, baffling, lovely book in one day and I'm still sorting it out in my head. Our narrator is a time machine repair man in a science fictional universe that's only 93% actually built, so there are areas and characters that aren't entirely fleshed out. Time travel depends mostly on changing your tenses (this is science FICTION, after all) but really the book is about a guy who misses his father. Time travel, he explains eventually, is the idea that right now you're experiencing the present and remembering the past. All you have to do is experience the past while remembering the present and voila. The narrator tells us that most people rent a recreational time travel device to go visit the worst day of their lives and then break the machine because they can't fix that experience, but of course he's trying to use his to find his father.
I was expecting a much twistier twist ending, but instead the book is mostly a meditation on regret and how much you can accidentally hurt your family without ever really understanding them. And at the same time it's full of sci-fi jokes, particularly about Star Wars. It's not really a book about time travel, it's more a philosophy thesis written as a novel. I think I loved it, but I'd have to re-read it to be sure.
Grade: A
Originally posted 2010
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