Book Review

A Remedy in Time, by Jennifer Macaire

I’m a sucker for stories about time travel, but I usually try to be discerning in which ones I give my attention to, rather than just slavishly reading any old time-travel pulp. This is another physically small book filled with small type [10.5pt Bembo Std, for those typophiles among my readers], running to only 179 pages, but it packs plenty in to that page count [I’m not gifted with the ability to visualise word counts, whereas page counts make much more sense]. This is a reasonably prolific author, with fourteen publications to her name, and many of them seem to have a time element in the name, although not necessarily time travel. The synopsis on the back cover, albeit somewhat melodramatic, seems acceptably concise, so I will shamelessly quote it here—the strapline is: “To save the future, she must turn to the past.” [The text is laid out centrally oriented, to simulate sand passing through an hourglass, but I will eschew that, and apologies for the Ands and But, which I normally also eschew]:

San Francisco, Year 3378. A deadly virus has taken the world by storm. Scientists are desperately working to develop a vaccine. And Robin Johnson — genius, high-functioning, and perhaps a little bit single-minded — is delighted. Because, to cure the disease, she’s given the chance to travel back in time.
But when Robin arrives at the last Ice Age, hoping to stop the virus at its source, she finds more there than she bargained for. And just as her own chilly exterior is beginning to thaw, she realises it’s not only sabre-toothed tigers that are in danger of extinction…”

It is difficult to explain much detail from the story without spoiling the plot, but it is possible to make some general observations, in addition to saying that I enjoyed reading it. Very much in its favour, in contrast to most narratives dealing with time travel, which gloss over, or even omit details of what the process involves, is the fact that this book gives some very plausible information to this layman, at least: the travellers are “basically frozen, then unravelled atom by atom, and projected into a vacuum where our atoms are shot into a sort of hadron collider.” This sounds similar to the Star Trek “beaming” process, but that could just be a coincidence, of course. The element which I find difficult to accept [but then again, I’m a layman, so what do I know?] is “…our atoms are immutable so they can be taken apart but they will always snap together in exactly the same order they started out as. That way, we don’t leave as human beings and arrive as pineapples, for example.” Wait a minute: wasn’t that the reason why the ST transporters had pattern buffers? Anyhoo, she [Robin] does say that the process is “incredibly painful”, which I have no difficulty believing!

Mindful of the danger of interfering with the timeline, customarily the travellers are exhorted not to interact with any organic matter, unless it has a specific purpose which, of course, this latest mission does, or leave behind any anachronistic artefacts. It is interesting to speculate, given the currency of the publication date, whether the story is to any extent inspired by the contemporary pandemic: if so, sadly, we don’t have the exotic option employed by this story at our disposal. The travellers have a strictly limited ‘window’ for their missions, and an option of a rescue mission, activated by a message sent via a beam of light similar to that used to send & retrieve the travellers, also exists. The travellers are even injected with a self-destruct capsule which is set to dissolve all organic matter in its vicinity after a set timespan, to avoid the timeline contamination if the mission were to fail disastrously. One general observation I would make [and not unfamiliar to those of my close acquaintance] is that, as usual, money causes all the regular problems in the future as distant as the one described here, even with the sophisticated technology in evidence, and colonisation of Mars, in our own solar system: greed is the primary evil, as ever.

I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable with the option chosen by Robin in the dénouement, to resolve the situation but, thankfully, I know that isn’t remotely likely; having said that, the course she opts for, after overcoming the perils she encounters, is highly commendable, given the circumstances. The paperback I read was published in 2021 by Headline Accent, an imprint of Headline Publishing Group, ISBN 978-1-7861-5790-4.

This will be my last post before the new calendar year, so happy Solstice/Yule to all my subscribers, and compliments of the season to all who celebrate it—here’s to happier times ahead!