My new essay, “A Lover’s Quarrel with Time“, is out today at Vector, the journal of the British Science Fiction Association.
It takes Solvej Balle’s literary series On The Calculation of Volume, about a woman trapped in an eternally repeating day, as the basis for a wider-ranging discussion about our perception of time, and its depiction in fiction, in an era of crisis and turbulence.
You can find “A Lover’s Quarrel with Time” at the Vector website.
“In times of uncertainty, what we can imagine ahead of us matters.”
I write on Kaliane Bradley’s wonderful novel The Ministry of Time for the British Science Fiction Association’s journal Vector, and consider the book’s wider implications for public imagination in a turbulent era.
“Time travel in science fiction has, itself, a history and prehistory, a present, and presumably a future. It has the potential for new and emergent ideas of temporality – scientific, poetic, popular, expert – to succeed those currently held by researchers, philosophers, artists, authors, critics, and the general public of the day…Perhaps Bradley’s novel will also, in times to come, show itself to be one of the works that opened the door onto a new era of popular time travel fiction. This new era is one which, however fraught, creates new opportunities for us to face up to the uncertainties around us.”
