I love everything from the classic H.G. Wells time machine to the ancestral summons in Octavia Butler’s Kindred to Doctor Who traversing time and space in the TARDIS. Whether the story is reckoning with the past or exploring the infinite possibilities of the future, I love what it has to tell me about human agency, memory, free will and consequence.
That’s why I was delighted to discover a new-to-me time travel device in Scott Alexander Howard’s debut novel, The Other Valley. The setting of the novel is an isolated town in a mountain valley. However, the town’s borders are heavily guarded, because just over the mountains to the east of the town is the identical town, only twenty years into the future. Over the mountains to the west is the town twenty years into the past. Past each of those valleys, the time sequence repeats, on and on, forever. The only people allowed to visit the other towns have to be approved by the town council, whose counsellors restrict any visits to mourners in disguise, wanting to see their loved ones one last time.
Sixteen-year-old Odile is the main character, who along with her classmates at school is trying to figure out the shape of her future: which apprenticeship or job will define her life going forward? She’s not very ambitious, but with her mother’s prodding, she is able to secure a place in the group of young adults being vetted for a spot on the highly regarded town council. One afternoon, however, she accidentally recognizes visitors to her town from the east. What she does and doesn’t do with that information radically affects both her present and her future.
Time travel narratives often grapple with the butterfly effect: the idea that one tiny interaction can have ripple effects into the future, with potentially catastrophic outcomes, perhaps even existential annihilation. The Other Valley embraces this idea directly in the narrative, as it is included in the town council’s considerations as they weigh petitions for visitors to the other valleys. I loved how the novel embodies this idea by centering the character of Odile as she faces both her future and her past. Putting a coming-of-age story into a time travel story sharpens the emotions she feels and the decisions she faces. Doesn’t every teen feel some kind of anxiety about what path to take in their future? But how acute would your anxiety be if your future could visit your past and potentially change its path?
You can tell that the novelist Scott Alexander Howard has studied philosophy. His PhD work focused on memory, literature and emotion, particularly emotions focused on the passage of time. With The Other Valley, he has managed to craft a very compelling story with tender, intimate prose that brings the reader on a philosophical journey about fate and free will, grief and love, choice and regret. If you are a fan of Kazuo Ishiguro or Emily St. John Mandel’s writing, I would recommend The Other Valley as a similarly beautifully written, tangled-in-time novel.
