Likely Stories - The Ministry of Time

The illustrious Bill Nye the Science Guy once waxed philosophic on the idea. He said, "it's like time travel in science fiction. When is now; when was then?" With a book like The Ministry of Time, a debut novel by whipsmart author Kaliane (Kally-anne) Bradley, it seeks to answer those questions as well as "Who is now, and what were they like then?"

Before you get your head too twisted or go down the wormhole, don’t worry. Bradley lays out the very simple rules for time travel in her book’s universe, and it’s nothing too complex to keep straight. This is a character-driven story of adventure, love, finding your place in the world and across timelines. In the not-too-distant future, the British Ministry of Time is established to help what they call "expats" assimilate into modern society. These people are refugees of a sort from various eras in time, sent here to help discover if time travel is feasible theoretically and physically. Each expat is assigned a Ministry employee called a "bridge" to help them adapt to life in the 21st century.

Commander Graham Gore (AKA "1847") and his bridge (the only name she's ever given throughout the story) spend a lot of time together while she teaches him about things like washing machines, feminine liberation, and Spotify. As they live together over the course of the year and grow close with other expats and bridges, their relationship deepens significantly, but when the reality of the Ministry's project is revealed, the bridge has to decide if holding on to the past is worth changing the future. There are some moments when this is a slow-burn love story about two people who have a 200-year age gap, some moments when it’s a spy thriller on the level of James Bond, and some moments when you wonder if we’re veering away from science fiction and into speculative fiction–could this really happen?

The author is a British-Cambodian woman, and the main character is also a British-Cambodian woman, so we get a lot of first-hand insight into things the author may have felt or struggled with in her own life and then fictionalized for the book.

What I liked most was the thoughtful way she approached time travel assimilation, taking a big-picture view to the challenges facing expats like 1847 or 1916 or 1645. What WOULD it be like to wake up plunked in the middle of the 21st century with your last memories those of your demise and be held responsible for the fate of a country and even the world, so long as you don't crack up? And also to realize that it’s kosher for women to wear pants these days?

Graham Gore was a real person, a commander on an ill-fated voyage of a ship called the Erebus, which was doomed when it got stuck in a sea of ice. Having a historical footnote come to life in such an intriguing way made this story all the more interesting. We may not be able to travel back and forth in time (yet?), but stories like these show us the importance of living in the here and now.

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