A DISCOVERY OF TIME AND SPACE (THE PERILS OF TIFFANI)

In Smith’s SF novel, a college student finds herself experiencing increasingly bizarre incidents involving distortions of time.

At the University of Colorado, Boulder, Tiffani Taylor is a student resident advisor in the undergraduate dorms. One day, she lapses into a state of altered consciousness in which she observes an empty landscape, passes out in public, and is briefly aided by a mysterious older woman. An adoptee, Tiffani has dark skin, an unknown ethnic background, and a diagnosis of ADHD; she is consumed by curiosity over the incident and what implications may lurk in her genes. As a strong support group of friends and classmates helps her investigate, over successive days Tiffani’s weird episodes continue, usually in moments of emotional duress. In the course of these incidents, she appears to move at super-speed relative to her environment (“And then, it seemed like I ran like the wind or something even faster than the wind. I took a step, and the rest of the room slowed to a crawl. I took a second step, and everything but me stopped”), and catapult back and forth in time (making it a struggle to maintain continuity and hold on to her valued RA job). Nobody mentions Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), with its hapless hero “unstuck in time,” but Tiffani’s faithful friends make inquiries at the school’s physics department, and these detours take the plot into the universe (multiverse?) of the author’s previous books, including Reality Alternatives (2016) and Temporal Dreams (2016), with guest appearances from their own dimension-hopping characters. This nimble narrative maintains a flighty tone, even with mild elements of danger and unease. Near the end, things really take off with a madcap cascade of competing timelines, alternate realities, and duplicate Tiffanis. Smith, a physics researcher and blogger, concludes the book with a short piece on contemporary quantum-physics theories of multiple realities. While this novel is the first in a series, it can be read as a standalone story.

A pleasing, tongue-in-cheek SF romp through mischief in the multiverse.