ELEVEN ELEMENTS

Time-traveling agents from the 26th century materialize in 21st-century Florida on a mission to ensure the survival of a manifesto that will save the Earth.

In Joshi’s SF debut, a time-traveling squad from 2532 voyages back five centuries to central Florida on an urgent task. But their rematerialization goes awry, leaving some agents gruesomely disintegrated. The hasty mop-up alerts local authorities that something uncanny is afoot. Veteran time-travel mission commander Maxilon Renner suffers partial amnesia, only belatedly recalling their quarry: Joshua DeWine, aka Jaiswal Diwanji, an Indian American architect who’s also a biological prodigy/mystic/messiah. (He’s “like the human system booting into its most optimal version.”) His unpublished The Manifesto of Eleven Elements is destined to convert greedy humankind into responsible planetary stewards, but a spreading zone of darkness across the years ahead indicates that this crucial manuscript doesn’t survive. The team must ensure that DeWine’s sustainability blueprint circulates despite a possible traitor among Renner’s ranks, the interference of rival time travelers, and the likely involvement of rogue sentient AIs called “uBots.” The narrative includes much sermonizing about the violations of Mother Earth (the 2532 folk, hailing from a utopian culture, can barely tolerate 2025). As the plot unfolds, themes from the DeWine manuscript begin to dominate; characters are transformed by the manifesto and become conduits for the message. Appendices outline new forms of government, economy, and so on; the clever author has anticipated that critics will complain that a crackerjack SF thriller has been lost in the shuffle. Variant spellings and disguised versions of real people (including a Donald Trump whose crazy policies might actually be a brilliant bulwark against a sinister Chinese conspiracy) suggest that all of this happens in a parallel reality—one in which fictional news outlets blurb this book. Fans of similar what-ifs (Salman Rushdie’s 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet comes to mind) will most likely be transfixed, but with several more books promised in the series, it’s an open question as to whether the indoctri-tainment will hold up as well as it does here.

Plans for a better Earth packaged as a time-travel SF thriller (or maybe the other way around).