Provenance: World Con was in Seattle last year, and though I did not attend, I resolved to read the Hugo novel nominees for that year. And I failed, bailing out halfway through one of the Adrian Tchaikovsky novels. But I did get a copy of The Ministry of Time front the local Barnes & Noble, which has, it should be noted, very much improved over the past couple years.
Review: This book was well-lauded before I even reached it. It is a New York Times bestseller, a pick for the Good Morning America Book Club, a monthly pick for Barnes & Noble, a Best Book of the Year for NPR, Vanity Fair, Good Housekeeping, and some 25 more outlets. Oh, and Obama liked it as well.
I liked it. It didn't win a Hugo. And yeah, I think I understand why.
So here's the skinny. Our unnamed narrator/protagonist works for government ministry in London, and discovers, after she has been hired, that it has a time machine. Sort of. They have access to a "time door" that they can open into other eras. And not to mess up the timeline, they are taking/kidnapping people from the past near the end of their lives in situations where they would not be missed. One of these is Graham Gore, one of the crewmen on the Franklin Expedition.
Now, the Franklin Expedition rates up there with Nikola Tesla in the things-nerds-care-about-department. The Franklin Expedition consisted of the ships Terror and Erebus, which were dispatched with two years of supplies to find the Northwest Passage. They didn't find one, but instead got trapped in the ice for a couple years, and its people (including Gore) died either on the ice or trying to escape it. Including Gore. Except Gore got kidnapped and was brought to this near future London where the effects of climate change is already starting to flood the city.
Our unnamed narrator serves as a "bridge" for Gore, along with some fellow workers for other expats from the past. And "bridge" is a good title for combination minder/agent/guide to the modern world. She and Gore fall in love, discover a conspiracy from their future that intends to capture or destroy the time door, and their allies start dropping like flies.
So the novel veers from dark workplace comedy into rom-com, then slingshots into a thriller, and finally sticks the landing in a science fictional space. Our narrator is relating what she knows of the story, which is more about the effects of time travel on a relatively small group of people - the bridges, the ex-pats, the management, and the assassins from the future. Early on, she lays down the absurdity of the situation.
"How does it work? How can it work? I exist at the beginning and the end of this account, which is a kind of time travel, and I'm here to tell you: don't worry about it. All you need to know is that in the very near future, the British Government developed a means of time travel but had not experimented with it."
That's a pretty piece of writing, with tenses spilling all over the place. But what its talking about, the nature of the document you're reading does get explained, and it makes sense by the end. At the time, I thought it was going to be a denial of the SF tropes we all know - paradoxes, grandfather clauses, alternate futures. But you're going to run into them, but from the ground-level view. So we embrace the tropes, but not the way you might think.
The book is really good, and deserves to be a Hugo nominee, but I can see how it didn't make the final cut, and much of that is because of the nature of genre. As noted above, the book refuses to "stay in its lane", and while I like that, I understand that it might not resonate elsewhere. But also its part of its own provenance, and how it entered the market. Ministry of Time first showed up in the new fiction release as opposed to the SF areas of bookstores. Most of its high praise comes from traditional/mainstream sources. It was therefore "not of the body" of SF-Dom. Genre can be both a leg up (a "guaranteed" customer base) and a limitation (reaching out beyond that "guaranteed" base).
Still, Ministry of Time is worth considering on the quality of its writing, and I recommend you check it out.
More later,
