KICKASS REVIEWS

HOW TO DISAPPEAR FOREVER

BY EMILY BLAISDELL - RELEASE DATE JANUARY 16, 2025

Not just another time travel novel

Starred Review

Fast-forward, if you can bear it, to 2027.  When a Silicon Valley genius invents digitime, all hell breaks loose, but also plenty of surprises in Emily Blaisdell’s debut novel TimeLiners.

Time travel has been done to death but Blaisdell comes up with a new twist and rides it for all it’s worth.  After profiling entire groups of time travelers — the Pioneers, the Romantics, the Seekers, etc., — she creates an Everyman (Guy McGee) and a disgruntled cynic (comedian CC Clement) each fleeing the madness of our own world.  Then, with the comedian’s mother, a physicist, in hot pursuit, Blasidell sends her characters back in time in search of a better era.  Was there such an era, or has nostalgia been sweet-talking all of us?

Blaisdell is not strong on characterization but she shines in putting readers right there in the past.  Vivid tableaux of World War II Seattle, 1950s San Francisco, and a dozen other timespots make up for what the novel lacks in personality.  And Blaisdell has great fun mocking both the travel industry — “We’d like to welcome you to 1968. . .” — and online technology.

In the near future conjured by TimeLiners, we will use such apps as Spewbox and Blather, Timehole and Factswamp.  The tradeoff for convenience, as in our own time, is the chaos a well-meaning genius can wreak upon a yearning world.  The book’s best character, the Timemaster who made time tourism possible, is an hysterical parody of Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, and other Big Tech Bad Boys whose “small disruptions” threaten to ruin the present, just as the Timemaster’s breakthrough may well ruin the past.

Fun, clever, and always surprising, TimeLiners is not just another time travel novel.  It’s a trip!

OUR VERDICT — Get it before time slips away!