Memory of Different Times: A Review of Recursion, by Blake Crouch

Time travel is one of the best travelled staples of science-fiction, from books to television shows to movies, it is the ultimate form of exploration.  The concept of time travel is almost as old as the history of writing, with the first known written example dating to around 400 BCE.  In the Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata, King Raivata Kakudmi journeys to heaven to meet Brahma, the Hindu creator god.  When he returns to the moral world, centuries have passed.  Time travel in fiction, from this ancient epic to Stargate and Doctor Who, usually involves physically transporting one-self through time, bringing your body and memories with you.  Threats include meeting your past self, or encountering the grandfather paradox, or making changes to the past which may affect the future.  Very rarely do we get a novel in a similar vein to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, where time travel is a person journey into your own memories.

Oath in Ink: A Review of The Outlaw and the Upstart King, by Rod Duncan

Some of the best novel series understand that, in order to keep a fictional world interesting, they need to change or play with the genre in some way.  A novel is never just science-fiction, it can be a mystery set in a science-fiction universe.  Or the first novel can be hard science-fiction, where the second brings fantasy elements into the mix.  With The Outlaw and the Upstart King, Rod Duncan’s follow up to last year’s steampunk adventure The Queen of all Crows, he takes readers away from his sci-fi Victorian setting and to somewhere new.  The setting of this second novel resembles a more medieval, violent Arthurian wilderness with none of the first novel’s trappings of setting.