The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas

Review

I breezed through this one, and enjoyed every page of it. It’s a fairly ‘light’ book - and I mean this in a good way. The prose is unintrusive and to the point, the chapters are really short, and the story isn’t weighed down with pointless sub-plots or meanderings.

I note that Dr Mascarenhas is a psychologist, and this actually makes a lot of sense. Aside from one of the main characters being a psychologist, at points we are treated to interesting insights into what makes some of the characters tick.

Speaking of the characters: All of the main characters are women. I found this quite refreshing, but surprisingly little was made of it. Perhaps that was the point - why wouldn’t the main characters all be women?

The way the time travel aspects were handled was also interesting. The reader isn’t presented with in-depth explanation of the mechanics of time travel, or analysis of paradoxes, etc. They are simply presented as givens, and the story moves on. This is quite unusual for sci-fi, so if that’s the sort of itch you want to scratch then you’d best look elsewhere.

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