TIMELINERS: A NEW TAKE ON A TIRED TROPE

By Alissa Akbar

Timers Book Review

Slightly more than a century has whizzed past since the invention of time travel.  H.G. Wells’ 1895 fantasy The Time Machine jumpstarted the genre which has since expanded into whole worlds of romance, escapism, and pseudo-physics.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of time travel novels have sent their protagonists back to kill Hitler, roam through ancient Rome, or just meet Lincoln or Shakespeare.  Movies and TV from “Back to the Future” to “Outlander” have taken their turn.  Strange, then, that no one has ever imagined time travel as an industry.

Enter Emily Blaisdell.  A first-time novelist from Brooklyn with a surprisingly deep knowledge of recent history, Ms. Blaisdell has invented an entirely new way of traveling in time — as tourists.  Her delightful TimeLiners posits a world where the past — the last 150 years, at least — is suddenly opened up to all of us.  Through a magical and slightly sinister breakthrough called digitime, a creepy Elon Musk-ish genius uses digitime to break the time barrier.  And within months, the TimeLiners — Time Jockeys, Long Gone Liners, Le Temps Perdu and others — are taking planeloads of people back, back, back in time.

This is a clever premise, one that could have taken readers almost anywhere, or as Blaisdell spins the term, “anywhen.”  But instead of focusing up front on a single time traveler, some Marty McFly of the TimeLiner set — Blaisdell leads with separate chapters about entire groups of travelers.  The Pioneers.  The Romantics.  The Nostalgics, etc.  By far the most fun of these is The Fans, which imagines crowds chasing Einstein and other celebrities through the past in search of selfies.

This ensemble approach makes the first half of TimeLiners alaternately amusing and surprising, but also a little confusing.  Characters dominate one chapter, only to vanish in the next.  Luckily, two strong protagonists eventually emerge from the montage.  Once they do, the rest of TimeLiners takes flight.

Casey Clement is known to her stand-up comedy fans as CC Clement.  Funny, acerbic, and purple-haired, Casey survives an attempted rape on her pioneer trip to 1927 to become a time travel addict.  She pops up here and there throughout Blaisdell’s time montage, traveling to see the first Burning Man and to wink at Paul McCartney on Abbey Road.  But as her own life dissolves, she flees the present for good.  TimeLiners much stronger Book Two follows Casey in search of “a place where you can hear yourself think.”  Meanwhile her mother, a physicist, chronicles her own time travels in search of her errant daughter.

FIlling out the cast of characters is a self-proclaimed “time flaneur” named Guy McGee.  We meet Guy as one of The Seekers, but his flights in search of countercultural touchstones provides a parallel dance with Casey’s desperate roaming through the 20th century.  Guy is not as strong a character as Casey, but his encounters with Hunter S. Thompson — who fires his shotgun at him — and Steve Jobs, who moons Guy and the crowd of time travelers surrouding the fabled Apple garage — are worth the trip.

But TimeLiners, as its promo proclaims, is NOT science fiction.  Instead, much of the journey turns into mild mockery.  Blaisdell has great fun parodying our high-tech toys as they morph into the future.  (The book is set from 2027-2031).  So Netflix becomes Meh-flix, online shopping is done at Stuffpile.com, and social media sites include Blather and Spewbox.

Will Guy and Casey find happiness in the past, perhaps together?  WIll Casey’s “Momster” ever find her daughter?  Will the “small disruptions” caused by mass time travel take down the entire world?  Only time will tell.  But in the meantime, TimeLiners is a refreshing take on a tired old genre.  The novel sweeps you into a past both appealing and appalling. When you return to our own wackdoodle era, you’ll close the novel thinking, ‘If only. . .”