TIMESLIDE

A fantasy/science-fiction novel that occasionally reads like a comic book or a graphic novel without the images.

The plot of Timeslide is intermittently coherent, but readers will suss out that it’s set in a future world in which most inhabitants can’t remember more than five years of their past. A group of replacers (“just like people, only smaller, and weaker, and softer, and shriller”) threaten to take over, both literally and metaphorically, other life forms that are more mechanical and androgynous. The replacers, in other words, are in danger of humanizing the powers-that-be. These powers consist of Lone, the narrator (whom readers find at the end of the novel is actually Bruce Malone, an intelligence officer sent by the president to stop certain untoward scientific experiments being carried out by “Newton”) who works hand-in-glove with the Amazonian Karla, destroyer of replacers and mega-woman extraordinaire. She’s contemptuous of Lone’s weaknesses, but he admires her. At one point he sees her “collapsing [the replacers] dead with her q-pulser, moving with such quickness, elusiveness, and precision that before I fully come back to my senses all our enemies have been targeted and abated.” Abated indeed. Atreides is in love with language, perhaps a bit too much so, because Lone can lapse into prose tinged with purple–“I wormhole through it all. I pass like a god-gale lifting the veils of possibility, painted with the marbling-dreams of the cosmic mind, to a reality of self-possession.” The most verbally effusive character is Madsphinx, who lives up to his (or its) name by spouting a stream of quasi-philosophical, quasi-scientific and occasionally quasi-comic persiflage–“So, Eckhart and his followers had to recover Proclus’s Neoplatonism with the meta-ontology of the One as the seat of the Being–sedes ipsius esse in uno est–and the theme of the fluxus entis.” Madsphinx can go on like this for hours, testing the reader’s forbearance.

Raises some interesting questions about human identity, but the inflated prose undermines the narrative.