Time Travel Paradoxes and Rainbow Rowell

 

    I have read several books by Blake Crouch, like Dark Matter and Upgrade. He has solid, semi-scientific sci-fi plots about the multiverse and gene editing. His latest book, Recursion, is about time travel. I especially like time travel as a plot line. One of my favorite authors, Connie Willis writes amazing time travel books: Doomsday, and To Say Nothing of the Dog are two of her best. Crouch deals credibly with several hiccups in time travel. Can you kill Hitler and stop World War II? Can you kill your grandfather or grandmother? Would you cease to exist because your parent was never born? Time travel brings out a person's violent nature, apparently. He also addresses a larger question of who might control time travel and for what purpose? He rocks the ideas, but his characters are like sock puppets and not flesh and blood people. In that way, he reminds me of old school Sci-Fi where the idea is the essential part of the story. I liked it.

Here is a informative website about time travel paradoxes: https://www.astronomytrek.com/5-bizarre-paradoxes-of-time-travel-explained/ 

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   I have been reading another Young Adult book about a magical school with a prophecy of a chosen one who will come and save the supernatural world, and it's been good. It is the Simon Snow trilogy by Rainbow Rowell. I've read Carry On and Wayward Son and am working on the third. A secret vampire at the school--a creature killed by magicians on site--is also gay. Rowell uses Baz's need to keep his vampireness a secret as a metaphor for being in the closet. His roommate Simon Snow suspects, but can't prove it. This gives the story a spellbinding 😉 tension. Simon and Baz have been enemies since they were magically forced to be roommates at age eleven. Simon's best friend, Penelope, and his girlfriend, Agatha, help him in his fight against Baz. They are in their senior year, and the threat to the magical world, the Insidious Humdrum, is about to overwhelm their school and the larger world of magic. The story is complex, suspenseful, and staffed with full-orbed characters. When a character's motives are revealed through magic, they could be red for evil, and blue for good, but most are a shade of purple. That describes most characters and makes the books compelling.

    In the second book, Wayward Son, Penelope, Baz, and Simon go to America to visit Agatha. Rowell's characters mature over the course of the series learning things about others and themselves. There is excellent poking fun at Amercan culture. A Renaissance Fair through British eyes are hilarious. Rowell uses the friends on a journey trope and they encounter wonderful and deadly creatures, fall in and out danger, and acquire a new friend. I like the second book better than the first.

    These books are a spin-off from Rowell's earlier book Fangirl in which the main character writes fanfic about the Simon Snow series. Rowell went to actually write the series.

    Rowell and I share the same birthday, February 24th, but are ten years apart, and she lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where I lived during high school. So I suspect I might be living in a time travel paradox, and she has my writing life! 

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