Ancient Logic

This was not the book I intended to read first after finishing Peripheral. But I knew within the first five pages that I would be reading this from cover to cover before I read anything else. That’s the power of a good book, of an arresting story. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (the now uncovered pseudonym of YA author Catherine Web) is that.  The simple idea behind the novel, a tweak of the Groundhog Day, is that certain individuals, called Kalachakra , are reincarnated into their own lives existence after existence, living the same span of time from infancy to death again and again. Harry August, for example is always born in 1919, spends his routinely traumatic childhood in Northern England, before winding up dying some time around the fall of the Berlin Wall. In different hands I think this novel could have easily been basically  contemporary fiction. Recall the Time Traveller’s Wife as an example of modern literature’s increasing appropri...

What would a time traveler from the mid-90s think of our 2013 present? What would catch this hypothetical chrononaut's eyes? What would require explanation or provoke confusion, even alarm? I asked this question of one of my friends recently, hoping to generate some interesting conversation to mine for a story I'm working on currently. He pointed to the device I was even then twirling around in my hands. "What's that?" he said simply. I think this is probably the best answer for my question. When I cast my mind backwards and think about how the world looks versus now, I'm not sure, on the surface, how much would seem strange or out-of-place. It's been a few years since I've seen Hummer's rolling around everywhere; hybrids and smartcars seem more fashionable. But it's not like you see the flying cars and hoverboards of everyone's  speculative daydreams. The world of buildings and streets, cars and buses, trees and parks, families...

I saw Looper on Saturday but my feelings on the movie are still fresh. I've already recommended it to a few friends (the few that haven't already seen it, that is) and I think that's about the right approach to it. It's a movie you tell your friends to see. You caution them that it's not Primer and they shouldn't spend too much time puzzling through all of the Timey Wimey permutations of the plot. You tell them it isn't worth it. Don't get me wrong, Looper's a lot of fun. The world depicted in the movie is low-rent but believable. The world of 2044 isn't so different from our own: slumping into decay; grimy cars retrofitted for natural gas and solar panels, cities awash in corruption and glittering sky-scrapers. The difference is that the world of Looper is in contact with another future, about 30 year later that keeps sending the people it can't properly kill to be assassinated and disposed of in the more unruly past. The Loopers of the ti...