Lisa Goldstein has an incredible track record as a fantasy writer , include the prize - win The Red Magician and the beautiful collection traveller in Magic . Now she ’s write a science fabrication book of account about sentence travel , Weighing Shadows — and it ’s just as mythic and strange in its own room .
Without giving too much away , Weighing Shadows is about a cleaning lady named Ann , who ’s sort of a paranoid uber - hacker who maintain to herself and bear down a wicked problem . Until one Clarence Day , Ann gets levy to connect a occult organization of time travelers called Transformations Incorporated . The company is really go by people from the future , the 24th century in fact , but they demand mass from the other twenty-first hundred to go back in clip to various points in history and make small change .
The next earth of 2327 is suffering from huge environmental problems , and the human backwash does n’t have a terribly bright hereafter — but making even bantam changes to the past can result in Brobdingnagian alterations to the time to come . So Ann and her fellow worker are send back on missions that are often as elementary as snub an axel on a cart , or move a vase from one table to another , causing the future to be reshaped . Except that Ann quickly begins to suspect that her company ’s agenda is n’t as benign as she ’d been conduce to believe .
Oh , and this is a human race where you’re able to utterly change the past tense , and there ’s only one cohesive timeline — so whatever changes you make , you ’re stuck with . ( I always like that form of prison term travel , personally . )
There are a few things that make Weighing Shadows singular among time - travel book . First , the notion of someone from the present being enter by mass from the hereafter to interchange the yesteryear is a nifty concept that opens up all sorts of motion about agendas , but also perspectives on the past . In some way , the hoi polloi of 2015 call on out to be more exchangeable to the people of chivalric Europe than we do to the masses of 2327 , but in other ways we ’re much more like our descendants than our ancestors .
But also , the meter periods that Ann visits provide an opportunity to show how much more complicated and multi - superimposed company were in the past , including some civilization that we reckon of in simplistic , brutal terms . Ann visits ancient Crete , which turns out to be a matriarchal refinement whose custom hold our theme about monarchy and commonwealth . likewise , trips to ancient Alexandria and medieval France reveal societies that are in ceaseless fluxion , in which some elements of the society are astonishingly undefendable and others are more repressive .
In Weighing Shadows , you discover that the grounds why change the past is so relatively easygoing is because societies are , in general , surprisingly well-situated to tip in one guidance or another . Every society has elements that are pushing them down a more progressive or permissive path , alongside element that are pushing in a more repressing direction . It ’s this struggle that Ann finds herself possibly on the wrong side of , and the Bible takes an overtly feminist turn that may seem preachy to some reader . But the best consequence in Weighing Shadows are downright creepy , as we get glimpses of what it looks like when the worst inherent aptitude of human nature end up holding tilt .
Ann is a unambiguously disaffected booster , who ’s scarred by her terrible family relationship with her mother and has job with authority — and it ’s captivating to watch someone like that go back in time and attempt to overstep unnoticed in various period of history . She feels vividly drawn even when her circumstances are slightly unelaborated .
Much like Goldstein ’s last leger , The Uncertain Places , Weighing Shadows is written in a sort of exaggeratedly matter - of - fact , simple tone in which events just sort of happen , one after the other , with no pause to consider how strange they are . It remind me a routine of the pointedly dim-witted style of the last few Gene Wolfe book , to a exchangeable effect .
The Uncertain Places was one of my favorite book by Goldstein , and Weighing Shadows is n’t quite as much sport — but it is a very singular spin on clip locomotion , dystopia , and the abuse of powerfulness . Anybody who know time travel account and wonders about the ramifications of switch the past times will get a huge kick out of Weighing Shadows .
Get it fromAmazon , BN , Mysterious Galaxy , IndieboundorWorldcat .
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