An oppressed man living in a future where women are the dominant gender is sent back in time to prevent the birth of the catalyst for the future, in hopes of asserting the patriarchy once more.

Social satire paired with an unusual time travel conceit sounds about half my jam, and that’s pretty much the hit rate for this one, in the end. Humour usually doesn’t land on me, unless it’s macro and substantive. We follow F-10 as he is sent back to an estate that’s in a tough neighbourhood. As he attempts to locate and kill Haley, the mother of the woman who births the male oppressed future, we encounter the butterfly effect. Although a variant of it I haven’t personally seen in fiction. F-10 essentially fails forward, advancing the story, or else it rewinds to the mistake, and he tries again. There’s a really effective motif paralleling this of a reclusive Rastafarian DJ plugged into the CCTVs choosing music to suit circumstances, but also the needle tracking the current groove. It’s the song fitting what’s happening, but also the track of time we are currently in. It’s a pretty brilliant device, I think, that helps the reader catch onto what’s happening, but expands the worlds in an evocative manner.

Rather than a run-and-gun, find and kill kill kill narrative evocative of the oft mentioned Terminator movie (a kind of ur text for the oppressed men, which depicts a now erased masculinity), we instead find him sheepishly inverted in gender roles. While he venerates “Arnie”, he can’t ape the patriarchy, having no lived experience. So, it rather becomes a meet-cute, where he attempts to attract her and negotiate a way to get her alone. It’s an effective way to show the gender norms and unique ways in which men have been oppressed, where typically lots of sci-fi just simply mirror the oppression from men to women in a rather one-size-fits-all manner that doesn’t really hold up. Nash has clearly put some thought into how men are oppressed differently, such as not being allowed to gain muscle mass unless they’re gay, and gyms being shut down. It always has a satirical bent because it’s clear that the joke is still on the men. Even though they’re somehow smart enough to make a time machine that functions, their methods of establishing primacy—even over one another—are literally laughable.

Indeed, it becomes a bit easy to tell how the story would play it because of those elements introduced. But there is a satisfying and symmetrical ending that had just a small caveat that really drove home the themes and the satire, even when coupled with the inevitable ending.

This preceding Nash’s latest works, at a craft level I did find the prose work less precise. There are some confusing elements occurring in rooms where choreography would have really helped. Most of the dialogue is in dialect, a stylistic choice that’s just not my favourite. I’m not sure why, but lots of sci-fi from that generation, such as Neuromancer, all have Rastafarians in them, and all have them in dialect. There’s a neat inversion of circumstances and the bringing together of all the characters that was conducive to a good ending as well. But, yeah, I imagine Bob Marley, or perhaps that music just really influenced people of that age. I think with dialogue, I wasn’t fully convinced the characters would be deploying the kind of vocabulary they were, and it’s just not as honed as to when to deploy more complex diction, whereas Three Dreams in the Key of G is perfect with it. There are some themes here that clearly have interested and inform, I imagine, his later novels as well, which is just fun. It’s neat seeing the development of a fantastic writer.

Overall, it’s literary in terms of intersecting with sci-fi in a manner I think is exceptional. Most of the time my gripe with literary intersections with genre, but especially sci-fi, is people having a central conceit that is there as a plot device and nothing more. It doesn’t affect the world in usually any significant way, they just like That Thing and want it, so they insert it. They don’t know how to, or decline to, interrogate it. Time After Time’s conceit is fully married to the concept. From the satirical elements to the social to the play on the Terminator concept, it’s clear that everything is thought out. It also doesn’t conform to sci-fi tropes, plot, or characterization. It’s character driven, withholds catharsis, doesn’t have a typical character arc, isn’t interested in gratuitous, bombastic set pieces. It is doing what it wants, and does it well, imo. Had I been a reader who particularly liked humour saturating prose, it would have been a five star read, I think.