Poetry in Space

Bad poetry, Book Reviews, Blatherings.
Monty Reads: RealmShift by Alan Baxter Last year, I attended the Continuum Convention in Melbourne. I snuck into the end of a readings panel one day, and caught the end of a reading by Alan Baxter. I don’t remember what the story was, but I remember thinking “that’s awesome, I want to read his stuff!” And then I went home and didn’t read any of his stuff. That was until I was given the opportunity to get RealmShift as an ebook, which I jumped at.  I read this book on the train. For some reason, it really suits train reading. It’s about an immortal being, Isiah, who goes about fighting demons and trying to restore balance to the belief systems of the world. I really like the ideas of religion in this book - humans believe something strongly enough, and it is real. Your deity, whatever that may be, exists because you believe in it. As an atheist myself, I don’t believe in any deities. But I do believe in having faith. Believing in something, anything, is important, it gives life meaning. I think RealmShift supports this; it gives importance to the self, to the character. Humans are the important ones, those who do the believing. RealmShift ties together these ideas of faith and belief in a gritty, violent, suspenseful story. I didn’t want to get off the train so that I could keep reading, sometimes! The thing that annoys me about ebooks, though, is that you don’t know the weight of the book. At 153 pages of tightly formatted text, RealmShift is not a short story. But I went into it thinking it was shorter, and I think that affected the way I read it. It wasn’t a bad thing, but I was a little impatient waiting for the story to get going.  Overall, a fun bit of reading, something that I probably wouldn’t have picked up myself, what with all the demons and extra-human abilities. But I enjoyed it and will definitely now find more Alan Baxter to read.  

Monty Reads: RealmShift by Alan Baxter

Last year, I attended the Continuum Convention in Melbourne. I snuck into the end of a readings panel one day, and caught the end of a reading by Alan Baxter. I don’t remember what the story was, but I remember thinking “that’s awesome, I want to read his stuff!” And then I went home and didn’t read any of his stuff. That was until I was given the opportunity to get RealmShift as an ebook, which I jumped at. 

I read this book on the train. For some reason, it really suits train reading. It’s about an immortal being, Isiah, who goes about fighting demons and trying to restore balance to the belief systems of the world. I really like the ideas of religion in this book - humans believe something strongly enough, and it is real. Your deity, whatever that may be, exists because you believe in it. As an atheist myself, I don’t believe in any deities. But I do believe in having faith. Believing in something, anything, is important, it gives life meaning. I think RealmShift supports this; it gives importance to the self, to the character. Humans are the important ones, those who do the believing. RealmShift ties together these ideas of faith and belief in a gritty, violent, suspenseful story. I didn’t want to get off the train so that I could keep reading, sometimes!

The thing that annoys me about ebooks, though, is that you don’t know the weight of the book. At 153 pages of tightly formatted text, RealmShift is not a short story. But I went into it thinking it was shorter, and I think that affected the way I read it. It wasn’t a bad thing, but I was a little impatient waiting for the story to get going. 

Overall, a fun bit of reading, something that I probably wouldn’t have picked up myself, what with all the demons and extra-human abilities. But I enjoyed it and will definitely now find more Alan Baxter to read.  

Monty Reads: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler Another in my long list of time travel novels to read. Kindred has got time travel in it, but it’s not the most important part of the story. The protagonist, Dana, is a modern black woman (from 1976) who gets pulled back in time to 18-something. She saves the life of a (white) child who turns out to be one of her ancestors. Essentially she has to make sure this creepy kid gets with one of his slaves (eventually) so that she can exist in the future. The time travel takes a back seat as the story of Dana fitting in with the nineteenth century society, and how she learns to survive as a slave. The time travel is never explained fully. There’s theories, but there’s no all-knowing entity that explains it all. It’s written in first person, from Dana’s point of view, so that adds to the non-explanation. The story itself is pretty good. It’s pretty darn horrible at times, but that’s a given, seeing as Dana has to pretend to be a slave. The one thing I didn’t like was the framing of the story - the ending is revealed in the prologue. Also the epilogue doesn’t seem to fit too well. But that’s about the structure rather than the story. The story, although repetitive in some places, was interesting enough to keep me going. 

Monty Reads: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Another in my long list of time travel novels to read. Kindred has got time travel in it, but it’s not the most important part of the story. The protagonist, Dana, is a modern black woman (from 1976) who gets pulled back in time to 18-something. She saves the life of a (white) child who turns out to be one of her ancestors. Essentially she has to make sure this creepy kid gets with one of his slaves (eventually) so that she can exist in the future.

The time travel takes a back seat as the story of Dana fitting in with the nineteenth century society, and how she learns to survive as a slave. The time travel is never explained fully. There’s theories, but there’s no all-knowing entity that explains it all. It’s written in first person, from Dana’s point of view, so that adds to the non-explanation.

The story itself is pretty good. It’s pretty darn horrible at times, but that’s a given, seeing as Dana has to pretend to be a slave. The one thing I didn’t like was the framing of the story - the ending is revealed in the prologue. Also the epilogue doesn’t seem to fit too well. But that’s about the structure rather than the story. The story, although repetitive in some places, was interesting enough to keep me going. 

Monty Reads: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu I was really looking forward to reading this. I have been on the search for good postmodern science fiction novels with time travel in them, and this came up in a google search, saying it was an excellent debut from a young writer and it’s got time travel and stuff. Or something like that. So I was hopeful. I shouldn’t have been so hopeful. I think my high expectations ruined my enjoyment of it a bit. Yes it has time travel in it, but it’s not very postmodern. The only thing slightly postmodern in the idea of an artifact that comes into existence because it already exists, but even calling that postmodern is a bit of a stretch. There is a certain level of self-referentiality that I quite enjoy though.  Ok, plot: Charles Yu (the character) is a time machine repair man and he lives in his time machine-ish machine which basically removes him from time. His father went missing some time ago, and his mother lives in a one-hour loop of a memory, making dinner for her family who aren’t really there.  The problem is, there’s not much plot. The book begins with the sensationalised “When it happens, this is what happens: I shoot myself. Not, you know, my self self. I shoot my future self.” This event doesn’t happen until almost half-way through the book. So what else happens first? Well, Charles explains a lot about how his father is missing. That’s about it. I think my main problem with it is that I can tell that Yu (the author) has read a lot of time travel theory. Because I recognise certain ideas and phrases he uses. Things are explained in terms of their ‘ontological importance’ and tensed and untensed theories of time. The idea in the book is that somehow there are universes that have ‘science fictional science’ and people become heroes and villains (for example there are Star Wars universes) but either I missed the importance of this or it wasn’t really explained. The novel gets very bogged down in cryptic pseudoscience that doesn’t make much sense but tries to justify itself by using fancy wording. There’s also excerpts from the book ‘How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe’ which are convoluted and sometimes have no correlation to what’s going on in the story.  I know I’m being pretty harsh, and it is a good book - when there is a story it’s relatively engaging -  but there’s too much pseudoscience. Or more to the point there’s a lot of pseudoscience that isn’t fully explained or relevant to the story. I love me some pseudoscience, when it is important. I think this book focuses too much on ‘science fictional science’ and not enough on the story.   

Monty Reads: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu


I was really looking forward to reading this. I have been on the search for good postmodern science fiction novels with time travel in them, and this came up in a google search, saying it was an excellent debut from a young writer and it’s got time travel and stuff. Or something like that. So I was hopeful.

I shouldn’t have been so hopeful. I think my high expectations ruined my enjoyment of it a bit. Yes it has time travel in it, but it’s not very postmodern. The only thing slightly postmodern in the idea of an artifact that comes into existence because it already exists, but even calling that postmodern is a bit of a stretch. There is a certain level of self-referentiality that I quite enjoy though. 

Ok, plot: Charles Yu (the character) is a time machine repair man and he lives in his time machine-ish machine which basically removes him from time. His father went missing some time ago, and his mother lives in a one-hour loop of a memory, making dinner for her family who aren’t really there. 

The problem is, there’s not much plot. The book begins with the sensationalised “When it happens, this is what happens: I shoot myself. Not, you know, my self self. I shoot my future self.” This event doesn’t happen until almost half-way through the book. So what else happens first? Well, Charles explains a lot about how his father is missing. That’s about it.

I think my main problem with it is that I can tell that Yu (the author) has read a lot of time travel theory. Because I recognise certain ideas and phrases he uses. Things are explained in terms of their ‘ontological importance’ and tensed and untensed theories of time. The idea in the book is that somehow there are universes that have ‘science fictional science’ and people become heroes and villains (for example there are Star Wars universes) but either I missed the importance of this or it wasn’t really explained.

The novel gets very bogged down in cryptic pseudoscience that doesn’t make much sense but tries to justify itself by using fancy wording. There’s also excerpts from the book ‘How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe’ which are convoluted and sometimes have no correlation to what’s going on in the story. 

I know I’m being pretty harsh, and it is a good book - when there is a story it’s relatively engaging -  but there’s too much pseudoscience. Or more to the point there’s a lot of pseudoscience that isn’t fully explained or relevant to the story. I love me some pseudoscience, when it is important. I think this book focuses too much on ‘science fictional science’ and not enough on the story. 

 

Monty Watches: Timeline (2003) Ok, so I don’t normally review movies on here, but as I read Timeline and then found out there was a movie based on it with Gerard Butler and Billy Connolly, I had to watch it.  It was terrible. Worse than the book. Instead of one of the main characters being an archaeologist  he’s the Professor’s son. Which means he HAS to help get him back from 1300s France. Also he gets shut down by the one female archaeologist and then half an hour later they’re kissing. Huh? And Gerard Butler (whose character in the book is Dutch but in the film is… whatever accent Gerard Butler has) falls in love with the first woman he meets in the past. (“Holy shit! you’re a girl!” yeah, that smooth.) Also there’s little things that annoy me like everyone gets a ‘marker’ that if one of them presses it, all of them get brought back to the present. Except the first thing that happens when they get to the past is they get attacked, and Redshirt presses his marker, and ONLY HE gets sent back to the present.  And everyone keeps losing their markers. Seriously, it’s the ONLY THING you have to get you home and “oops mine fell off.” It smushes the 40-hour chronology of the book into 90 minutes. Mostly by cutting the 37 hours the archaeologists have in the book to get the Professor back into ‘oop, you’ve got 3 hours.’ Which means they go from actiony-bit to actiony-bit with no real direction.  And there’s some stupid causality stuff that makes little sense.  Basically, I hated it. 

Monty Watches: Timeline (2003)

Ok, so I don’t normally review movies on here, but as I read Timeline and then found out there was a movie based on it with Gerard Butler and Billy Connolly, I had to watch it. 

It was terrible.

Worse than the book.

Instead of one of the main characters being an archaeologist  he’s the Professor’s son. Which means he HAS to help get him back from 1300s France. Also he gets shut down by the one female archaeologist and then half an hour later they’re kissing. Huh?

And Gerard Butler (whose character in the book is Dutch but in the film is… whatever accent Gerard Butler has) falls in love with the first woman he meets in the past. (“Holy shit! you’re a girl!” yeah, that smooth.)

Also there’s little things that annoy me like everyone gets a ‘marker’ that if one of them presses it, all of them get brought back to the present. Except the first thing that happens when they get to the past is they get attacked, and Redshirt presses his marker, and ONLY HE gets sent back to the present. 

And everyone keeps losing their markers. Seriously, it’s the ONLY THING you have to get you home and “oops mine fell off.”

It smushes the 40-hour chronology of the book into 90 minutes. Mostly by cutting the 37 hours the archaeologists have in the book to get the Professor back into ‘oop, you’ve got 3 hours.’ Which means they go from actiony-bit to actiony-bit with no real direction. 

And there’s some stupid causality stuff that makes little sense. 

Basically, I hated it. 

Monty Reads: Timeline by Michael Crichton I struggled with this one. Only because I found it boring and the real story didn’t start until 120 pages in. So I had to force myself to finish it. Once it got more into the exciting parts of the story it was easier. So, the story. A bunch of scientists and archaeologists are hanging about a French castle ruin. Their professor goes missing after a meeting with the company funding their research. Then they find a piece of parchment from the 1300s with the Professors handwriting on it. How could that be? Three students are taken to the company’s headquarters in somewhere in the middle of the desert in a mine where they find out that time travel is possible and they need to go back to save the Professor. They go back to the 1300s and go on a big adventure trying to get to the Professor before their time runs out (batteries only last 37 hours). They run into knights, get into battles, escape prison about four times, all sorts of mischief. I groaned a lot when they were explaining the time travel. I think the problem is that is Crichton explains too much. There’s even diagrams. Basically, there isn’t time travel as such, but multi-universe travel. It goes by the theory that there are multiple universes - every time a choice is made a new universe is created. So there’s infinite universes. The problem I have with it, though, is they don’t explain how they go BACK to the 1300s. That yes, they can travel between universes (using a human-sized fax machine that doesn’t have a reason why it works, it just does) but there’s no explanation of the being able to go to different times. Also the explanation of why the grandfather paradox doesn’t occur is that “time paradoxes do not occur.” There’s a clunky version of the banana peel theory (that something will happen to you so you can’t kill your grandfather) but I wasn’t convinced. Half the time there’s too much explanation, the other half it’s pushed aside by “it just happens that way”. Overall: a relatively interesting story with too much clogging it up. The exposition takes too long, the company is a little too mysterious, and there’s a whole first chapter that doesn’t do much. At nearly 500 pages, it’s a little too long for the story, I think.

Monty Reads: Timeline by Michael Crichton

I struggled with this one. Only because I found it boring and the real story didn’t start until 120 pages in. So I had to force myself to finish it. Once it got more into the exciting parts of the story it was easier.

So, the story. A bunch of scientists and archaeologists are hanging about a French castle ruin. Their professor goes missing after a meeting with the company funding their research. Then they find a piece of parchment from the 1300s with the Professors handwriting on it. How could that be?

Three students are taken to the company’s headquarters in somewhere in the middle of the desert in a mine where they find out that time travel is possible and they need to go back to save the Professor.

They go back to the 1300s and go on a big adventure trying to get to the Professor before their time runs out (batteries only last 37 hours). They run into knights, get into battles, escape prison about four times, all sorts of mischief.

I groaned a lot when they were explaining the time travel. I think the problem is that is Crichton explains too much. There’s even diagrams. Basically, there isn’t time travel as such, but multi-universe travel. It goes by the theory that there are multiple universes - every time a choice is made a new universe is created. So there’s infinite universes. The problem I have with it, though, is they don’t explain how they go BACK to the 1300s. That yes, they can travel between universes (using a human-sized fax machine that doesn’t have a reason why it works, it just does) but there’s no explanation of the being able to go to different times. Also the explanation of why the grandfather paradox doesn’t occur is that “time paradoxes do not occur.” There’s a clunky version of the banana peel theory (that something will happen to you so you can’t kill your grandfather) but I wasn’t convinced. Half the time there’s too much explanation, the other half it’s pushed aside by “it just happens that way”.

Overall: a relatively interesting story with too much clogging it up. The exposition takes too long, the company is a little too mysterious, and there’s a whole first chapter that doesn’t do much. At nearly 500 pages, it’s a little too long for the story, I think.

Monty Reads: Replay by Ken Grimwood. My third time travel book this week. I surprised myself by reading it all in one day! Jeff Winston dies in 1988 and wakes up in his college-days body in 1963. He the relives the next twenty-five years until he dies again and wakes up again. And he does this a few times. He isn’t trapped in watching the world go past, like Amis’ Time’s Arrow or Vonnegut’s Timequake, he can change things, bet on Derby winners, marry someone else. Each replay he does something different. The book explores Jeff’s emotional reactions to reliving the same time, the same global disasters, presidential assassinations. It also explores ideas of loss, relationships, shared experiences, but also the importance of not wasting time. Even though he replays his life over and over again, Jeff doesn’t have an infinite amount of time. It makes him appreciate the importance of being happy with yourself and doing what you need to do to be happy. I quite enjoyed the book, although I sometimes got annoyed at the characters. I think it will be useful for my thesis, as the character experiences time non-linearly and this affects him in many ways. I’m still unsure of what direction my thesis is going, but it will have something to do with the experience of time, so yeah.

Monty Reads: Replay by Ken Grimwood.

My third time travel book this week. I surprised myself by reading it all in one day!

Jeff Winston dies in 1988 and wakes up in his college-days body in 1963. He the relives the next twenty-five years until he dies again and wakes up again. And he does this a few times. He isn’t trapped in watching the world go past, like Amis’ Time’s Arrow or Vonnegut’s Timequake, he can change things, bet on Derby winners, marry someone else. Each replay he does something different.

The book explores Jeff’s emotional reactions to reliving the same time, the same global disasters, presidential assassinations. It also explores ideas of loss, relationships, shared experiences, but also the importance of not wasting time. Even though he replays his life over and over again, Jeff doesn’t have an infinite amount of time. It makes him appreciate the importance of being happy with yourself and doing what you need to do to be happy.

I quite enjoyed the book, although I sometimes got annoyed at the characters. I think it will be useful for my thesis, as the character experiences time non-linearly and this affects him in many ways. I’m still unsure of what direction my thesis is going, but it will have something to do with the experience of time, so yeah.

Monty Reads: Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. *note: depending on how spoilery you like your spoilers, there may be some spoilery spoilers in this post* I love novels that mess with the way you think. Novels that when you read them, you occasionally have to stop, look out a window and shudder. Or be halfway through a paragraph when you suddenly have to think about the nature of the universe. This novel does that. It’s thought provoking and interesting, and is ambiguous enough to make you question everything you’ve just read but not so ambiguous that you sit there and go “huh?”. Without going into too much detail, the plot is as follows: Rant Casey is a gross child who can identify a woman by her period pad (Palahnuik is really good at very blunt grossness) and he goes about getting bit by all manner of creatures; snakes, spiders, jackrabbits. He ends up as a ‘superspreader’ of rabies. Fun. When he moves out of his small town to the big city, where the population is divided by curfews into Nighttimers and Daytimers, he discovers a destructive youth pastime of “Party Crashing”, essentially a game of tag, in cars. Rant eventually dies in a big fiery crash and his body is never recovered. So thats when you realise that Rant may actually be his own father. Yeah. Through Party Crashing you can accidentally travel back through time and impregnate your mother. The novel is written in oral biography style - segmented and fragmented bits of interview, essays and histories that you as the reader have to piece together to make a coherent story. I don’t like the style, but it suits the story. Bits contradict other bits, you get a multitude of opinion, you get what seems to be impartial knowledge that turns out to be unreliable. I liked it. I didn’t love it because of the style, but it did keep me reading until 1:30am last night.

Monty Reads: Rant by Chuck Palahniuk.

*note: depending on how spoilery you like your spoilers, there may be some spoilery spoilers in this post*

I love novels that mess with the way you think. Novels that when you read them, you occasionally have to stop, look out a window and shudder. Or be halfway through a paragraph when you suddenly have to think about the nature of the universe.

This novel does that. It’s thought provoking and interesting, and is ambiguous enough to make you question everything you’ve just read but not so ambiguous that you sit there and go “huh?”.

Without going into too much detail, the plot is as follows: Rant Casey is a gross child who can identify a woman by her period pad (Palahnuik is really good at very blunt grossness) and he goes about getting bit by all manner of creatures; snakes, spiders, jackrabbits. He ends up as a ‘superspreader’ of rabies. Fun.

When he moves out of his small town to the big city, where the population is divided by curfews into Nighttimers and Daytimers, he discovers a destructive youth pastime of “Party Crashing”, essentially a game of tag, in cars. Rant eventually dies in a big fiery crash and his body is never recovered.

So thats when you realise that Rant may actually be his own father. Yeah. Through Party Crashing you can accidentally travel back through time and impregnate your mother.

The novel is written in oral biography style - segmented and fragmented bits of interview, essays and histories that you as the reader have to piece together to make a coherent story. I don’t like the style, but it suits the story. Bits contradict other bits, you get a multitude of opinion, you get what seems to be impartial knowledge that turns out to be unreliable.

I liked it. I didn’t love it because of the style, but it did keep me reading until 1:30am last night.

Monty Reads: The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov First of all, I’m a terrible SF fan because I’d never read any Asimov before yesterday. I have over the last year collected a whole pile of novels and theory based around the philosophy of time and time travel. I chose to read this one this week because I’m trying to find books that involve time travel but focus on the individual’s experience, rather than causality and getting bogged down in the science of it all. So, The End of Eternity. It’s a good book. It was easy to read, and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m super smart, but even the ideas of an alternate existence alongside Time (the Eternity bit) and the multiple Realities are quite easy to follow. The protagonist, Andrew Harlan, is fairly boring, but the events which surround him and influence his actions are the interesting bit. Basically this dude is a “Technician”, in charge of observing Reality and making small changes in order to make the future more beneficial. It’s a very “for the greater good” idea, where a select group of people are responsible for choosing which direction humanity should go. Harlan falls in love and in trying to save her, goes breaking a kazillion laws including travelling to the forbidden “Hidden Centuries”. It then gets a bit more into the beefy time circles and determinism and paradoxy ideas. Overall, I liked it, it was fun, and I may well mention it in my thesis.

Monty Reads: The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

First of all, I’m a terrible SF fan because I’d never read any Asimov before yesterday. I have over the last year collected a whole pile of novels and theory based around the philosophy of time and time travel. I chose to read this one this week because I’m trying to find books that involve time travel but focus on the individual’s experience, rather than causality and getting bogged down in the science of it all.

So, The End of Eternity. It’s a good book. It was easy to read, and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m super smart, but even the ideas of an alternate existence alongside Time (the Eternity bit) and the multiple Realities are quite easy to follow.

The protagonist, Andrew Harlan, is fairly boring, but the events which surround him and influence his actions are the interesting bit. Basically this dude is a “Technician”, in charge of observing Reality and making small changes in order to make the future more beneficial. It’s a very “for the greater good” idea, where a select group of people are responsible for choosing which direction humanity should go. Harlan falls in love and in trying to save her, goes breaking a kazillion laws including travelling to the forbidden “Hidden Centuries”.
It then gets a bit more into the beefy time circles and determinism and paradoxy ideas.

Overall, I liked it, it was fun, and I may well mention it in my thesis.

I want you to be ok.

I want to be the one that makes you ok
I know it’s selfish
And it’s stupid and impossible 
But I want to be the one
To hug you and tell you its all right
to calm your nerves
To bring you hot chocolate and soup
I want to be the one 
That helps you get better
That helps you find the way 
That helps you be alright 
I want to tuck you into bed
And maybe a little more than that
And hold you close 
And drive the demons away. 
I know this makes it all about me
And what I want
That makes me sad
And I wish it wasn’t so. 
But I care about you a lot
And want to make sure you’re ok. 
So I’ll sit here in my imaginary world
Where you come to me for help
And I can caress you and hold you
Until the world is ok again. 

By Eliza Bentley

Monty Reads: Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait by K. A. Bedford. I finished reading this book earlier this year, but hadn’t got around to reviewing it til now. Cause I’m lazy. I quite liked it, it was easy to read and generally entertaining. It follows a time machine repairman, Spider, through his improbable adventures with time travel, murder investigations and secretive apocalypse societies. The time travel in this novel is fairly easy to understand, and they get around some of the paradoxes pretty well. When the past changes because of time travel, the traveller has two realities in their mind, but only exists in one of those realities. Continual time travel results in headaches and confusion, and a feeling of not quite being there. Essentially this is just a murder mystery, but also has time travel. I like it. Not brilliant and thought provoking, but well written and entertaining. On my reading list now is pretty much every book that has ever been written that has time travel in it. I went a bit overboard on book depository. I’m currently part-way through Time and Again by Jack Finney and I’m still plowing through a lot of time travel theory. I read a good article on the film Primer which explains some of the cinematic techniques the creators use to highlight the subjectivity of the narration. It’s called ‘Primer: The Perils and Paradoxes of Restricted Time Travel Narration’ by Jason Gendler, and it is available online. In addition to all my time travel reading, I’ve been watching a few time travel movies and other films that play with time. Recently I’ve watched Primer, Looper and Memento. What other time travel and time-manipulating films should I watch?

Monty Reads: Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait by K. A. Bedford.

I finished reading this book earlier this year, but hadn’t got around to reviewing it til now. Cause I’m lazy. I quite liked it, it was easy to read and generally entertaining. It follows a time machine repairman, Spider, through his improbable adventures with time travel, murder investigations and secretive apocalypse societies.
The time travel in this novel is fairly easy to understand, and they get around some of the paradoxes pretty well. When the past changes because of time travel, the traveller has two realities in their mind, but only exists in one of those realities. Continual time travel results in headaches and confusion, and a feeling of not quite being there.
Essentially this is just a murder mystery, but also has time travel. I like it. Not brilliant and thought provoking, but well written and entertaining.

On my reading list now is pretty much every book that has ever been written that has time travel in it. I went a bit overboard on book depository. I’m currently part-way through Time and Again by Jack Finney and I’m still plowing through a lot of time travel theory. I read a good article on the film Primer which explains some of the cinematic techniques the creators use to highlight the subjectivity of the narration. It’s called ‘Primer: The Perils and Paradoxes of Restricted Time Travel Narration’ by Jason Gendler, and it is available online.

In addition to all my time travel reading, I’ve been watching a few time travel movies and other films that play with time. Recently I’ve watched Primer, Looper and Memento. What other time travel and time-manipulating films should I watch?