TIME'S NEW DAWN

In Gordon’s thriller, a scientist’s plan to save her city via time travel leads to endless complications.

Rebecca Dawn lives and works in New Hope, a city overseen by the United Nations in the Congolese jungle. Thirty years earlier, a meteor fell to Earth there. The meteor was the last piece of a black hole, and dark matter has since supplied power for the citizens of New Hope. It’s a place where one can “bend time”; rejuvenation pods make people young again by essentially isolating time. (“They make a vortex. You know, like water circling in a drain. And when the flow is channeled, it goes inside the chamber and moves backward while passing through the individual’s body.”) Not everyone is happy about New Hope’s lack of independence or the U.N.’s unregulated dark-matter experiments: A man named Richard Conners spearheads the New Independence Movement against U.N. control, which culminates in a calculated attack on Forever Young, the facility where Rebecca works. The result is a time fracture that threatens all of New Hope, including Rebecca’s parents. After Rebecca’s boss and mentor, David Young, shows her a time machine hidden in the lower levels of Forever Young, she gets an idea: She’ll hop into the machine, travel back a few years, and devise a plan for avoiding the present-day tragedy. Once there, she takes one simple albeit shocking course of action, only to return to her present and realize she didn’t quite solve the problem—she’s changed things she didn’t anticipate, in part because the time machine doesn’t function the way she thought it would. If she makes a return trip to the past, will her world become even more mixed up?

Gordon’s intricate story is chock-full of scientific terminology and both modern and futuristic tech: “She carefully navigated the layered menus and fallback triggers, a system unlike any she’d seen before…Legacy code wrapped in failsafe loops. A mechanical shell housing something closer to a temporal operating system than any field-control logic.” Descriptions like this do little to help readers understand the intricacies of dark matter and time travel, a problem exacerbated when David intentionally withholds information from Rebecca. Further complicating matters, while Rebecca travels into the past along a single timeline, the novel ultimately bounces around various other chronologies. Still, a cohesive narrative does play throughout. Even with the many characters involved, readers primarily follow Rebecca’s time-traveling, and it’s clear when she’s in the past. Headers denoting shifts in the narrative perspective provide the year as well as a helpful abbreviation that, while not immediately explained, is something most readers will be able to work out. Relatable details ground the story, including those pertaining to the time machine, a makeshift contraption with “rough welds” and “mismatched panels.” Rebecca is bright and instantly likable; she barely hesitates to put herself in potential danger (in a machine she’s unfamiliar with) once she’s convinced she can somehow save her fellow citizens. The final act comes complete with a startling turn, a thought-provoking revelation, and an unforgettable denouement.

An appealing hero drives this intelligent, labyrinthine SF yarn.