When you’re a time traveler, the people you love die, and you carry on seeing them, so their death stops making a difference to you. The only death that will ever change things is your own.
The Psychology of Time Travel is one of those books whose effect on me seems to grow over time after I’ve read it, rather than affecting me for a few days or weeks in a diminishing fashion. It’s been months since I finished it, and I find myself idly thinking about parts of it more days than not. Its weaving of timelines and plots and characters with divergent and overlapping motives is complicated — usually in a good way — and unravelling it is almost unsatisfying, because it’s the whole picture considered together that makes it so compelling.
At its most simplified, this is a novel about the fallout of four women inventing time travel in the 1960s. The effects of their decisions are not constrained to themselves, obviously, but the story remains tightly focused on the individual effects on a broad cast of (almost entirely female) characters. As a worldbuilding geek, I would have lamented the lack of consideration for the broader society-level effects if the tight frame hadn’t served the author’s style and purpose so well. It’s readily apparent that the author understands people as a trained psychologist and brings that perspective to bear on writing her characters. Her characters lie to themselves constantly, building their reality out of tightly woven falsehoods they’ve told themselves over and over. It builds a potent picture of narrative, and narrative’s role in our perception of history itself — a very fitting theme for a sci fi book.
I’d also like to reiterate that most characters in this novel are women. This fact casually handled and intensely refreshing, as were the romances between several of them. Calling it “casually handled” is not to say that the heavily-female cast served no narrative purpose, however — women experience unique challenges related to mental health and how it is viewed within society. This book reflects a number of those challenges, as well as less specifically gendered ones.
The Psychology of Time Travel is an ambitious, refreshing addition to the time travel sci fi canon.
Rating: 4/5
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