The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This… is a good book.
Time Travel is tough, dramatically speaking. There are a few ways to write it, and it’s tough to do any of them well without flubbing up the logistics or the narrative.
Back To The Future, while entertaining, is full of enough plot holes to make it a swiss cheese you could drive several trucks through. It uses the convention that you can change past events, but it is dangerous to do so. (One wrong move, and you destroy the universe or at the very least, yourself.) They slap all sorts of inconsistencies and odd conventions to increase the drama, which just ends up in a holy logistical mess. I get frustrated just thinking about it, so I won’t anymore. (Twenty minutes!? Twenty minutes!? Marty gave himself TWENTY EXTRA MINUTES to try and prevent Doc Brown from being killed?! WHY NOT A DAY?! A WEEK!? A YEAR!!!??? Arg. Ahem.)
12 Monkeys subscribes to the “nothing changes” convention, where everything that has happened, has happened, and you can’t change anything by traveling in time, because you didn’t. I think this movie is good, and intellectually satisfying, but suffers a little bit in the narrative sense.
The Time Traveler’s Wife also subscribes to the “nothing changes” convention, but the narrative does not suffer in the least. On top of that, it is an engaging romance novel.
The story revolves around Henry and Clare. Henry lives a life where every now and again, against his will, he drops out of his present and lands in a different time and place for a while. The author explores just about every nook and cranny of the consequences of such a life, and how a romance could happen in this situation.
It is funny, sad, and captivating. I was concerned that this would be a Romance novel with some bad time travel thrown in, or a Time Travel novel with some corny romance thrown in, but it is neither.
And now I have to give it back to Stacey, who was in the middle of reading it when I swiped it from her nightstand. Sadly, I believe I lost her place, too. Damn.
Go pick up To Say Nothing Of The Dog” for something similar. I very much enjoyed that, and may have to pick up “The Time Traveler’s Wife” now.
I have, in fact, read To Say Nothing of the Dog, and I enjoyed it very, very much. I also enjoyed Doomsday Book, the precursor, but it is not quite as good, and also not a comedy like Dog. Dog is delightfully P.G. Wodehousian.
Ms. Willis also has the distinction of earning my “Worst Science Fiction Work Ever” for her pathetic novel Remake. It has an appallingly stupid and improbable scientific premise involving how media would be distributed on a network.
Lincoln’s Dreams was just boring. After that, I just gave up on Ms. Willis.