TIME’S ELLIPSE by Frasier Armitage is one hell of a page-turner. Armitage has crafted a very readable, at times funny and tragic, propulsive tale front-loaded with intrigue. I was drawn in quickly.
With the story being about a crew of astronauts about to embark on a pioneering mission, it starts in a place that students of the genre know and love. We meet the crew, we start to understand their quirks, but we look for clues about what the nature of their mission will be, which part of it will go wrong, and more importantly, what’s at stake for crew and for mankind. To say more here would be a spoiler. But suffice to say I’m not giving away anything that’s not in the title when I say that anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for stories that play around with time. It’s a rich seam for exploring the nature of humanity, and the decisions of individuals, and how those decisions ripple out and affect others. Armitage mines that seam brilliantly here, on a cosmic scale.
When events deviate from the plan, as they inevitably do, we are drip fed clues about the nature of an upended world-view, one which the crew quickly have to adapt to. Kirk, a great character we follow early on, brings some Weir-esque science-based humour to the tale, giving us laymen readers a tour of the world we are entering, allowing us to live it by proxy through him. His initial assessments about just what the hell might be going on sends shivers. You can almost feel the blood draining out of everyone’s faces when he starts to make a mind-melting postulation that basically, as a reader, books you a ticket for the full ride. I remember thinking, wow, I’m in the front seat for this rollercoaster and I’m not getting off till I know how the ride finishes.
What follows is a dizzying cascade that encapsulates this new existence into a complex web of interconnectedness, the detail of which I’ll avoid here, except to say that there is a requirement for the reader to pay attention during this second quarter of the novel, because it sets up the next part beautifully.
The scope and scale expands beyond this into something unexpectedly epic. And it’s in this area that the true speculative elements of this speculative fiction hit home. The book, like all good sci-fi, asks “what if?” but then reaches beyond to ask “what then?”. More than once I found myself asking, just where is this story going to take me? Armitage chooses to take us in fascinating directions with the narrative.
Later, Machiavellian tactics are deployed between characters with agendas to preserve, with one particular chess-move exquisitely wrought, and the results of which add to the richness, and inform the tragic elements of the denouement. Some look forward, others don’t, often to their own detriment, both on Earth and elsewhere.
One of the absolute joys of this book is how Frasier Armitage does his world-building literally in realtime. Every development makes so much sense that when it’s seen once again by a new set of eyes towards the end of novel, we readers are already in on the deal. It’s clever, clever stuff. Then, some smart overlapping of narratives switches us back to things we saw earlier and brings a new perspective (an important staple of time-bending stories), and all the things we’ve been shouting at the page about, waiting for the penny to drop for certain characters, click into place with such satisfaction. I came away moved by this book. Looking back across all that had happened, I must say this is up there with other great sci-fi exploration tales. A stellar book, in every sense.