TimeLiners:  A Fun Romp Through

Pop Culture and the Past

By Dan Drexel

USA Yesterday

Ever dream of leaving it all behind, and I mean ALL.

Sure, any airline will take you to Amsterdam or Aruba but when you arrive, it will still be today.  Or maybe tomorrow.  But what if you could truly escape, fleeing not just place but time?  What if, as the band Radiohead advises, you could “disappear completely?”  Sound tempting in our crazy times?

Time travel, of course, is nothing new.  It’s the stuff of far too many cheap novels, sci-fi fantasies, and just about every fourth series on Netflix.  But each time traveler, whether mad scientist or mourning widow, travels alone.  Not anymore.

TimeLiners (★★★ out of four) is the first novel by a young Brooklyn woman who seems to know everything about the last 100 years and is eager to take readers back there. In the fertile imagination of Emily Blaisdell, time travel becomes mass tourism. “So the whole mess started when the Timemaster made his breakthrough,” Ms. Blaisdell explains. “Digitme, the little twerp Calle dit. Suddenly the past was open for travel, exploration, tourism. . .”

“The whole mess” begins in the not-too-distant future — 2027.  That’s when Time Jockeys, Time After Time and other TimeLiners begin taking thousands of ordinary people back to the past.  Echoing the mindless patter of airliners, Ms. Blaisdell has each landing signaled by “We’d like to welcome you to . . . 1968. . .   1975. . .  1927. . .”

As time tourism catches on, timeports spring up around the country.  Some “flights” are non-stop, others require you to change liners in 1992, 1981, whenever.  And although these time trips uncomfortably resemble our fraught journeys by jet, when you “land,” you find yourself in 1969.  Or 1985.  Or anywhere in the last 150 years.

Original, inventive, sometimes adrift but always compelling, TimeLiners is the best — and wittiest — book ever written about time travel.

A warning.  Few readers will share Ms. Blaisdell’s mastery of forgotten pop culture.  Who really remembers what year Pet Rocks became a craze or when Burning Man started?  Jokes about Milli Vanilli and Hootie and the Blowfish may be lost on younger readers.  But beyond her one-liners, Blaisdell shows a mature understanding of human longing and a wry sense of humor about our tech-sated world.

Who knows, perhaps in 2028, Netflix will be replaced with Meh-flix.  Amazon will give way to Stuffpile.com.  Wikipedia will become factswamp.org.  And social media will include Spewbox and Blather.  Once you trip the surly bonds of time anything seems possible.

So why go back in time?  To see lost relatives.  To watch ourselves on first dates ending in first kisses.  To get a glimpse of celebrities, from Einstein to Paul McCartney.  And ultimately, in the novel’s Book Two, to find a more sane era where “you can hear yourself think.”

While the opening chapters jump from group to group, TimeLiners eventually focuses on two fugitives from our frantic times.  Comedian Casey (CC) Clement roams the past in search of peace of mind.  The younger, hipper Guy McGee, inspired by his beloved Radiohead, just wants to “disappear completely.”

Guy’s and Casey’s isolated wanderings through the 20th century spin out even as the tourist invasion of the past causes “small disruptions” in the present that threaten apocalypse — soon.

TimeLiners may not make anyone forget “Back to the Future” but it is a promising debut by a clever wordsmith in full command of time.  If this be escape, I say log on to timehole.com and book your first flight.