By Kate Mascarenhas; Crooked Lane Books, February 2019
It was with quite a bit of excitement going in that I picked up Kate Mascarenhas’ upcoming novel, The Psychology of Time Travel, mainly because I am not sure if I have ever come across a science-fiction book where every main character was a woman. While that fact is disappointing, it’s not that surprising; woman are often under-represented in science-fiction, both as writers and as main characters. It is encouraging, then, that strides made in recent years to increase female representation in media is being seen in literature as well, and I’ve been eager to see what this new wave of diversity has to offer.
Mascarenhas’ novel is based in an alternative timeline, where a team of four female scientists invent time travel in 1967. Except for part of one chapter, the entire book is told from the perspective of female characters: the four initial team members—Margaret, Lucille, Grace, and Barbara—as well as other members of the team in later years, and a few family members, such as Barbara’s granddaughter, Ruby. The narration jumps around in time (as would be expected from a time travel novel) from 1967 through 2019, with each chapter in a different year and from a different person’s point of view. There are multiple, different interweaving storylines, including fractures within the relationships of the founding team members, the death of a time traveler, and the mystery surrounding both who the person is and how they died, and conspiracies regarding possible dangers of time travel and who may might covering them up—all rich, fertile ground for an interesting, complex story.
But the goal of representation isn’t just parity in numbers; it’s equality in substance and character development as well. So the question becomes not how a book measures up against other female-centric literature within a genre, but how it holds up in the genre as a whole. How does The Psychology of Time Travel fare? On the whole, quite well. One of the positives of the book is how Mascarenhas has fully fleshed-out all of her characters; they are vividly real, three-dimensional individuals worthy of main protagonist status, and not just inflated background players; you can understand each of their motivations, even if you don’t agree with them. While this development is impressive, the sheer amount of material generated as a result—from the number of different characters to keep track of, to the aforementioned multiple storylines, along with when and how information about those storylines is revealed—makes this a challenging read, even for those fully conversant in time travel literature. But it also shows that this level of complexity can be done, and done well, without the homogeneous constraints of the past. Hopefully it is representative of much more to come.
