time travel – Only Mostly Dead

All You Need is Kill, Hiroshi Sakurazaka

As is often the way with me, I got this book because of a podcast. Specifically Pop Culture Happy Hour were reviewing Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt movie this got made into, and one of the contributors – Glen Weldon I believe – said that it was worth reading this book as it was short and he implied it had a different ending.

So I bought the book, read a few chapters, set it aside and didn’t pick it up again until after I’d seen the movie – which was last week. I enjoyed the movie and so decided to read the book, and did.

A couple of decades or so into a global war with an invading alien race called the “Mimics”* Keiji Kiriya is a newish recruit in the United Defence Force (UDF). He’s a “jacket jockey” which is an infantry soldier in a powered exo-skeleton suit called, you guessed it, a jacket. We see him go through his day from waking up, through training, preparing for battle, fighting and subsequently dying in what seems to be a futile attempt to hold the Mimics back on the coastline of Japan. Did I say dying? Did I just give away a spoiler? Not really, as this is the premise of the book and film – we discover very early on that something is different about Kiriya, after that first death on the battle field he keeps going back, re-living the day over and over. So it’s a kind of Groundhog Day with aliens and war. We follow Kiriya as he tries to work out what’s going on, how to get out of the time loop, how to defeat the Mimics and what all this has to do with the near-mythic UDF soldier who crosses his path, Rita Vrataski, the so-called “Full Metal Bitch”.

OK. So first off I can say that both the movie and the book are fun and are different enough that if you’ve experienced only one (or neither) then it’s definitely checking out the other (or both). That said this is not a review of the movie, and I won’t be listing the differences between the two.

All You Need is Kill
is a fun, pacy, quick read. It has a certain tone to the language which is almost noirish in its grimy, toughness that I liked. It suited the story. It’s not deep but we skid along on the surface so quickly that that doesn’t matter. The time loop business was not over-used – that is to say, it didn’t become overly convoluted in a way that made my brain hurt (yes Primer I’m looking at you!) but served the purpose of the story. It’s particularly effective that what we end up with is a battle-hardened, war-weary veteran in the body of what the rest of the world sees as a raw recruit.

Like a lot of SciFi at this level the logic of it all doesn’t bear too close a scrutiny but that’s not what you’re interested in. And if you are this is probably not the book for you. If you want a fun little romp with aliens and fighting and so on then it may be.

I’d have like to have seen a slightly more nuanced view of women in this book, which you could argue is misogynistic. I think it’s mostly not but in a teenage boy’s naive, “it can’t be sexist if the women are kick-ass fighters too” kinda way. Then again nuance of any sort isn’t really that much in evidence here.

7/10 – all you need is a better title.

(*not really sure what they’re mimicking)

6000 Pages 2011, 11.22.63 – Stephen King (pages 7637 – 8489)

After I read Under the Dome earlier in the year I said to myself that I probably wouldn’t read another Stephen King novel. However I heard about this on Newsnight Review and was seduced by the concept and by the generally favourable comments on the writing. Also buoyed by my latest burst of enthusiasm for reading I didn’t feel intimidated by the length so I thought why not?

11.22.63 is a novel that centres around the assassination of John F. Kennedy on that date. However it’s a work of fiction and science fiction at that. A man who owns a diner in 2011 discovers in his store-room a kind of portal, what he calls a ‘rabbit-hole’ referring to Alice in Wonderland, that you can step through and be back in 1958. He convinces a friend of his, a school-teacher to go through the rabbit-hole, live in the past and then attempt to prevent the shooting of JFK.

I said that this was a science fiction book but as with Under the Dome King has a story he wants to tell and a way of setting it up which he cursorily describes – the time-travel is largely the later. It’s noteworthy that he chose not a time machine which could be targeted at a particular time but a naturally occurring (though presumably rare) phenomenon which a fixed exit point in time – September 9th 1958. This is worth pointing out because King makes it impossible for his hero to do anything other than spend 5 years in the past in order to achieve his goal. So really there are a few things this book could be/is about:

time-travel and its consequences, inherent paradoxes etc
what everyday life was like in late ’50s/early ’60s America
the events leading up to the assassination, and in particular the movements of one Lee Harvey Oswald
an alternate history story of what the world would have been like if the assassination attempt had failed.

And 11.22.63 covers all of these to a greater or lesser extent. However I think it’s fair to say if you’re more interested in the time-travel specifics or the alternate history than say Oswald and the 60s then you may not enjoy this book.

As it was I enjoyed it more than Under the Dome but still felt it was a little long. The book is split into sections and in the first there is a fair bit about the rabbit-hole, how it works and whether it’s possible to change the past at all (it is but “the past is obdurate” we discover). Then there’s the central section which involves the main trip back to 1958 and the following 5 years. This itself is split between a story of our protagonist actually living in the past – where he lives, the job he does, friends he makes, the woman he loves – and his attempts to track Oswald and gather the information he needs to stop him. The former I enjoyed, the later was over-developed in my opinion. I realise King has done lots of research and read lots of books but I really don’t need most of that information.

Of course these two stories inevitably come together and climax at the date in question.

I feel like there’s a really good 500-page novel in here. I’d cut a lot of the Oswald background details. I’d also trim down the story of how they prove that the past is changeable – which is almost a novel in itself. At 853 pages it tested my patience but I still came out enjoying it overall.

A couple of stray points. It’s noteworthy that whilst the hero is 35 in 2011 a sense of nostalgia pervades some of the descriptions of the past (like how wonderful the root beer tastes) and I think that’s because King was 11 in 1958. Also there are some references to other King novels – this is something he does apparently, I remember M. telling me that there are references in Under the Dome to characters in The Stand. Here the descriptions of the town of Derry, as if the place itself had some sort of supernatural malevolence, confused me slightly. Apparently if I’d read other works by King I’d’ve got the reference.

Finally worth pointing out, because it’s easy to forget and I did, that although there’s not much violence in the book when it does appear it’s pretty graphic. I was reading it wondering if it was strictly necessary then remembered I was reading an author best known for horror fiction.

Anyway – long book, long review, time to stop.

7/10 – a bit of a slog but worth it.