ONE SECOND PER SECOND

In Unwin’s SF debut, a troubleshooter for a secret, time-traveling agency visits three different eras in pursuit of someone meddling with the American Revolution.

Joad Bevan is a jaded member of the Time Management Agency, a top-secret government group in Washington state whose operatives work to detect and counteract rogue time travelers. Journeying through time and space can be achieved with modest-scale, exotic chemical reactions, discovered in the 1980s, that generate tachyons (faster-than-light particles). The TMA, fortunately, has the resources to prevent any upstart “time vandal” from disrupting the natural, chronological order of things. Joad must pretend that he’s merely doing arcane, cutting-edge scientific research to keep his winemaker wife, Bess, in the dark. Despite the secrecy, the protagonist finds his workplace dreary and rather absurd—existentially, psychologically, and logically. Then a massive tachyon strike on the TMA complex leaves the base shattered, with the rest of the staff cast back centuries to Colonial North America, and Joad finds himself in an altered landscape. He takes an emergency jump back to the early TMA of 1996 and discovers—in addition to a more positive office environment and a potential new love interest—that one of the agency’s own employees has turned against TMA and is meddling with historical events in 1777 Pennsylvania. Joad’s attempted rescue mission, however, opens up a maze of time paradoxes. Over the course of the novel, Unwin seems to have had quite a lot of fun engineering the plot’s Mobius strip twists and turns and philosophizing a bit about the elasticity of time and the universe (and yes, Doctor Who fans, there is a TARDIS joke). The grumbling hero would be the first to admit that a great deal of his story makes little sense in a straightforward way, and his refreshing attitude helps wind the mainspring of an SF subgenre that’s grown a bit lax from overuse. If Michael Crichton’s 1999 novel Timeline had starred as astringent a lead character as Joad, maybe its 2003 movie adaptation would have been better.

Original touches and a misanthropic protagonist keep this clever time-travel tale ticking along nicely.