Sometimes, you encounter a book that leaves you a different person after the final words. Time/Life is just such a book. It's about tech - and feels remarkably precient for the "AI" bubble that we're currently living through, but the time travel tech allegory will probably ring true for every tech bubble until time travel tech exists.

I've raved about this book to friends; the phrase "magical realism but sci-fi" came up. The 2020s world of Dory Silver, a journalist tapped to interview a big name in tech onstage at a big event in Vegas, is very real - and Mayer's use of words does give Dory's memories a magical quality (the author's vocabulary is poetic; she has fun with words!) - the magical parts are really the segments set in the distant future. They feel quite believable but have that hyper-real glow of magical SF. Trust me on this; I'm not on psychedelics, I promise.

The "big name in tech" I referred to is an Irish guy who *definitely* isn't Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel or... or... or... From the book, I gather that Elo uses the Irish spelling of O'Hallaron but my knowledge of Irish is a sliver above zero, so I'm not going to attempt it in my review.

This book is about time travel in the SF sense; our current societal obsession with technological advancements for their own sake, and the long term consequences of our actions, far beyond those any of us could even dream of predicting - but it's also intensely personal.

I knew I knew the name Catherine Mayer from somewhere; she co-founded the Women's Equality Party in the UK, and has been a prolific journalist. She was also married to Andy Gill of Gang of Four fame, until his death in 2020. This leads into the other part of the book; Dory's inner life. This felt oddly memoirish until I took a few minutes to look up the author online; then everything clicked into place - and I loved the book even more. Dory is the author, but also not. She's an avatar for her grief. 2020 was a strange, terrible and surreal year for *everyone*; the author maybe more than most of us, as both her mother and spouse died. Having experienced profound losses both drawn out and expected, and a whirlwind of shock and horror, this book has been a salve for both those wounds.

In the past year or so, I've read a number of contemporary books that acknowledge the COVID pandemic, but this is the first that really examines the emotional impact and lasting trauma of it all. Yes, lockdowns were stifling and boring for people (I'm disabled, so staying home all week wasn't that different to my Before) but the rush to move on and forget about everything that happened means forgetting about the victims who died and the victims who lived - the people who lost loved ones, and the people with Long COVID. So many people sacrificed their futures to try to help our world keep turning, and to aid and comfort the people who were dying. In our rush to get back to "normal" these people are trampled.

I'm meandering; so many words to say: read this book. It might not be for everyone, but if it's for you you will be transported, you will feel a lot of emotions (you might cry) and you will feel changed and renewed.

Well this book took me by surprise! I received a copy via NetGalley and I didn’t read straight away because the cover art work didn’t sell it to me, but truly, it’s great. Fans of Margaret Atwood, Ursula K Le Guin, Naomi Alderman, JG Ballard, HG Wells, David Mitchell, and Gang of Four line up and get a copy (if you’re a fan of the last on that list, definitely listen to the audio book).

Plus it’s one of those books that is growing on me more and more now I’ve finished it, which was helped along a lot by the author and Sandi Toksvig interview at the end of the audiobook. So this is very much a review for the audiobook (although I’m sure a print copy would be great too).

To get my critique out the way first - it’s written by a journalist and you can tell. It’s very journalistic in style and either she will continue to embrace this in further fiction, or it will mellow. I’d prefer the latter as I like my fiction to be rounder and more evasive, eluding and creating through plot, dialogue and scene setting rather than factual. However the bones of this book rang so true to my main literary and life interests I feel I need to leave that criticism to the side, and maybe embrace this style because it really packs a lot in.

Set now, in a world that thinks the pandemic is over (it’s not, neither here or in the book), it proposes to be an autobiography of a journalist called Dory Silver. She encounters a Time Machine through a live TV interview she is leading with a tech mogul - Elo O’Halloran (likenesses entirely fictional but I imagine also entirely purposeful). They get whisked into the future in a time pod and we get a story woven through multiple timelines.

Through Dory we learn about her relationship with her love, Morgan. Morgan who is not with her, is now seriously ill, with what sounds to me like severe long Covid/ME. This was the biggest surprise for me - a sci-fi tale that centres Covid and which upholds the experience of those most deeply affected by it both in the earliest days and now.

We also travel with Dory around the world in her memories, as she recounts stories she’s written and events she’s experienced. Through this we get a piercing and astute look at the world at the start of the 21st century.

The novel shifts between 1st and 3rd person, which I found confusing in audio, and wasn’t sure about. But Sandi Toksvig’s reflection that this switching untethers the novel from conventions made me rethink, and I agree that it does indeed do that.

There are many literary references (to Virginia Woolfe, to The Handmaid’s Tale, to The Time Machine) some direct some more vague. But I also think it works beautifully alongside Naomi Alderman’s recent novel The Future. The two books speaking to each other in my mind and making each richer in the process.

Catherine Mayer was the co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party and the widow of Andy Gill from the Gang of Four , who died of Covid in Feb 2020. She references herself in the book - a few times which made me wonder and I looked it up. But in the interview with Toksvig it transpires she wrote a large chunk of the book before Covid, in 2019, giving me shivers of prescience. The WEP also stood by Trans Rights, ultimately leading to its dispersal, which makes sense because this book approaches gender in ways I’ve only seen in Le Guin and Jasper Fforde’s work (in sci-fi anyway).

I’m shying away from saying too much about the plot. It’s simple but also dense due to Dory’s life experiences. But there’s a twist I figured out early on, and enjoyed very much. It underlined the book for me as a place I was both safe and welcome to be in. I thank Mayer very much for that.

Whilst the book is partially set in the future, and this gives it a really good story arc and holds the plot well, that was a side-story for me, with the real interest being how Dory explores grief.

I’m excited to see what comes next from Mayer; I’ll be keeping my ears peeled!