If You Like to Think Impossible Thoughts

If, like Lewis Carroll you have the kind of mind that likes to "think impossible thoughts", then you probably like good sci-fi literature.  I recently finished one of the best I have encountered in this genre, and here is my Goodreads review.

Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel by David Gatewood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow! There actually aren't enough stars here (or elsewhere) to express my rating of this collection.

I am a very finicky Sci-Fi fan - dungeons and dragons and anything revolving around swords or special weapons are out, and so are most dystopian works unless they are truly intelligent and actually have some science in them. Alternative futures/pasts I am pretty cool with, and true hard-SF of the Asimov/Clark/Bova and successors I am very into.

But I have always had a soft spot for what is generically called "time travel", although I went into this book expecting maybe at most a collection of creative but well-known paradox stories - "don't shoot your grandfather" kinds of things.

Boy, was I ever wrong! To paraphrase an American idiom - let's just say I think my socks are now firmly in some other time...and I am not too sure I want to chase after them after reading this extremely imaginative, creative, wrenching and hit-between-the-eyes-and-your-brain collection.

Nick Cole wrote a fair warning in the foreword that maybe I didn't quite pay enough attention to:

Time.

The great human enemy. Maybe the greatest. It's beaten everyone so far. The scoreboard doesn't lie:

Time: an immense, incalculable number
Us: 0

The rest of Nick's foreword is well worth reading, and he previews the general storylines that follow, but in fairness to him, it is not really possible to fully prepare you for it.

What follows is an incredible series of stories, unlike the usual time travel stuff in any way. Yes there are a few mild paradoxes thrown in, but the key is that this collection is about people - humans, and their individual battles/compromises/surrenders to time. They are about incredible situations and tests of our humanness, and humanity that just wouldn't happen if we stopped opening that door marked "Time", but then we wouldn't be human would we?

I won't single out any of the individual stories because they are all wonderful in their own way. They will make you gasp, scream, cry (more than once) and even laugh in a couple spots. But most of all, they will make you wonder, and think. And that is what great sci-fi is all about!

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