Review: Time after Time
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 7, 2013
A `hero' called F-10 is sent back from a future where men are menial workers in a world run by women. His task - assigned him by a spindly-legged man named Roger Jolly who has studied physics and loves the Terminator films - is to find and kill the mother of the ruler of this unfair world, to free the men of the future. The mother's name is Hayley. She likes a drink and she lives on a rough estate in England where gangsta rappers keep the local population under surveillance and under control.To succeed, F-10 has to kill an almost infinite number of Hayleys. Time after time he goes back to the point where he meets Hayley and starts again and again. Through repeated, unremembered meetings, as time bleeds into itself, they begin to develop an affinity with each other - the kind of understanding that would normally come from years of friendship. If they begin a relationship, will he abandon his task? What will become of the men of the future, including Roger Jolly? If he succeeds, will the new future be better than the one Roger and F-10 were experiencing?The action plays out like a scifi Groundhog day, with dark humour and the rhythms and rhymes of the streets as a soundtrack. The author even provides a playlist on Spotify if you'd like to listen along to the tracks mentioned in the book.We get Schrodinger's Cat, time travel, dystopia and butterflies. The butterflies are a motif throughout the book, both as symbolism for their beauty and fragility, and as an acknowledgement of the chaos theory that states that if a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it can have an effect on another.As Time after Time reworks and develops the encounters between F-10 and Hayley and shows us the payoff in the future, we get a fun lesson in physics... and a reminder to be careful what we wish for.