HOW WE KNOW OUR TIME TRAVELERS

Fourteen loosely connected stories in which characters navigate their many possible futures.

In these darkly glimmering short fictions, largely set in the San Francisco Bay area, characters are generally lovelorn, directionless, and occupying marginalized roles in society, uniformly seeking to pin down identities and experiences that keep evading definition. In the title story, an aging artist who has fallen out of love with her own work is approached in her studio by a fan who reminds her so viscerally of a younger version of her husband that he just might be a figure of the past come forward in time. In “The Encroachment of Waking Life,” potentially metaphorical time travel becomes literal as the narrator, Vaidehi, hops on a plane to San Francisco hoping to reconnect with her lover, Rama, and finds that she’s accidentally gotten on a flight to the future. For Vaidehi, only six months have passed since they’ve seen each other, but Rama’s extra “twenty years of memories” have transformed him into either a stranger or, more disconcertingly, the man he always was beneath the gloss of love’s first bloom. The theme of love distorted and identities gone awry due to the impact of speculative technologies is explored in many of these tales. In the Bluebeard-influenced “Assembly Line,” Ashlin, a Tamil American jewelry maker, is plagued by a troubling sense of “darkness and clouds” that obscures her ability to remember herself any further back than “yesterday, and perhaps the day before that,” even as she becomes more deeply involved with a student in her enameling class who works in artificial intelligence and seems eerily familiar with the self she cannot recall. In “The Glitch,” the code controlling the holograms that represent the narrator’s family is compromised, introducing the illusion of free will to the illusionary reality which “the coder” has created to escape her very real grief. Filled with engaging characters navigating their increasingly strange worlds, the stories are by turns winsome and unsettling. As a group, though, they have a tendency to keep hitting the same thematic notes, blurring some of the reader’s appreciation of their individual forms.

Compelling individual stories that falter slightly as a collection.