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A review by mkschoen
The Bad Part of Time by Joshua Ingle
1.0
This is a review of an ARC from NetGalley.
Variel Martinez is a bureaucrat with the Temporal Security Administration, an agency tasked with safeguarding the timeline as tourists, businesspeople, and refugees travel. They only go about 200 years into the future, because that's when the world ends -something everyone knows is coming, but most people ignore. The few who don't include terrorists trying to stop the impending apocalypse by blowing up the timeline. And Variel knows exactly who they are, because one of them is her younger self.
There was a good idea here about using time travel to examine whether people can actually change. If you can convince your younger (or older) self to see things differently, can you change the world? Or are we predestined to always be a true self. But it was SO confusing. It felt like Ingle was trying to do too many things - have a story about time travel, and the perils of capitalism, and age discrimination, and about 50 other things. And the logic of time travel just never clearly seemed to come together. The world is destroyed, yet people can still live there? Variel's younger self is from the past, but also from the future? Time travel means events are immutable - because you can go to the future and see something already happened, so now it's in your past, but you also can change everything by bringing something from the future to the past, and make people vanish out of existence? And it was difficult to put up with all the confusion because none of the characters were all that interesting, or even likable, so their impending doom really didn't seem like that big of a deal.
Variel Martinez is a bureaucrat with the Temporal Security Administration, an agency tasked with safeguarding the timeline as tourists, businesspeople, and refugees travel. They only go about 200 years into the future, because that's when the world ends -something everyone knows is coming, but most people ignore. The few who don't include terrorists trying to stop the impending apocalypse by blowing up the timeline. And Variel knows exactly who they are, because one of them is her younger self.
There was a good idea here about using time travel to examine whether people can actually change. If you can convince your younger (or older) self to see things differently, can you change the world? Or are we predestined to always be a true self. But it was SO confusing. It felt like Ingle was trying to do too many things - have a story about time travel, and the perils of capitalism, and age discrimination, and about 50 other things. And the logic of time travel just never clearly seemed to come together. The world is destroyed, yet people can still live there? Variel's younger self is from the past, but also from the future? Time travel means events are immutable - because you can go to the future and see something already happened, so now it's in your past, but you also can change everything by bringing something from the future to the past, and make people vanish out of existence? And it was difficult to put up with all the confusion because none of the characters were all that interesting, or even likable, so their impending doom really didn't seem like that big of a deal.