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Hazards of Time Travel
An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates
“Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.
Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.
“Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.
Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.
336 pages, ebook
First published November 27, 2018
About the author
Joyce Carol Oates
841 books8,405 followersJoyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Pseudonyms ... Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,224 reviews
November 29, 2018
I was so excited about the premise of this book and so so disappointed in the delivery of a book that I thought would be a wonderful midpoint of my favorite genre - time travel and dystopian adventure. The only way that this book makes the vaguest of sense is if it is a satire of dystopian fiction, written as insultingly terrible as a statement on her opinion of the genre... which I am in no way convinced that it is, given the summary, all the reviews, and the way it is written.
The main character is a 17 year old girl who starts as meek and passive and is exiled when she 'accidentally' gives a practice speech for the valedictorian achievement, which she receives also on accident, because it is considered illegal and she is exiled to the past. From there she makes not one single decision in the entire book, everything just happens to her as as she is treated as a set piece. The only plot point in the whole book is that she is stalker level obsessed with a comic-book style creep and thinks about him constantly. She follows him, does his laundry and dishes, and is set dressing for his more interesting backstory.... is this a commentary on how women are often treated in science-fiction? maybe, maybe not, but either way you still have to read hours of a woman being used as an object with no autonomy, back story, thought, redeeming characteristics, or development of any kind....
The actual style is almost journalistic - it is just a list of what happens, there are very few 'scenes' where anything happens, anyone interacts or says anything or anyone makes any decisions whatsoever. A vast majority of the book is either the main character thinking to herself about how obsessed she is with this man she has barely met, explanations of the alphabet soup of the 'future' government, and in depth descriptions of the psychological principals which were outdated, disgusting, and never disputed or discussed in any meaningful way - for example the bigwig professor is setting up a center for electroshock therapy for gay people, which nobody (future travelers included) seems to think is wrong, or in any way worth discussing, it is just mentioned about 10 times and left there among the other over discussed psychological junk.
The romance in the book is perhaps the worst part, the main character is obsessed with an assistant professor she barely knows, she follows him around and about half the text is her thinking about how much she 'loves him' and decides that the best way to get his attention is to just do whatever he says and be his house keeper to make him 'need' her. Eventually he convinces her to try and escape their imprisonment, which she has no opinion or thoughts on, she just goes along because she wants him to love her. In the end the only thing she ever does is fall in love fast, make herself subservient and in no way act as an active participant in her life. Once again this could be a satire of how fast characters often fall in love in the genre..... but I'm not convinced that this is the case, and either way it is painful and insulting to read
I wish I could get a refund on the time and money I spent on this book
The main character is a 17 year old girl who starts as meek and passive and is exiled when she 'accidentally' gives a practice speech for the valedictorian achievement, which she receives also on accident, because it is considered illegal and she is exiled to the past. From there she makes not one single decision in the entire book, everything just happens to her as as she is treated as a set piece. The only plot point in the whole book is that she is stalker level obsessed with a comic-book style creep and thinks about him constantly. She follows him, does his laundry and dishes, and is set dressing for his more interesting backstory.... is this a commentary on how women are often treated in science-fiction? maybe, maybe not, but either way you still have to read hours of a woman being used as an object with no autonomy, back story, thought, redeeming characteristics, or development of any kind....
The actual style is almost journalistic - it is just a list of what happens, there are very few 'scenes' where anything happens, anyone interacts or says anything or anyone makes any decisions whatsoever. A vast majority of the book is either the main character thinking to herself about how obsessed she is with this man she has barely met, explanations of the alphabet soup of the 'future' government, and in depth descriptions of the psychological principals which were outdated, disgusting, and never disputed or discussed in any meaningful way - for example the bigwig professor is setting up a center for electroshock therapy for gay people, which nobody (future travelers included) seems to think is wrong, or in any way worth discussing, it is just mentioned about 10 times and left there among the other over discussed psychological junk.
The romance in the book is perhaps the worst part, the main character is obsessed with an assistant professor she barely knows, she follows him around and about half the text is her thinking about how much she 'loves him' and decides that the best way to get his attention is to just do whatever he says and be his house keeper to make him 'need' her. Eventually he convinces her to try and escape their imprisonment, which she has no opinion or thoughts on, she just goes along because she wants him to love her. In the end the only thing she ever does is fall in love fast, make herself subservient and in no way act as an active participant in her life. Once again this could be a satire of how fast characters often fall in love in the genre..... but I'm not convinced that this is the case, and either way it is painful and insulting to read
I wish I could get a refund on the time and money I spent on this book
November 11, 2018
Joyce Carol Oates writes a fascinating multilayered, and complex dystopian novel that raises the spectre of totalitarian, controlling and heavy surveillance societies such as that of Big Brother in Orwell's 1984 and the in vogue Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale with Trump as the US president. In a world where dissent is not tolerated, where obedience and conformity is expected and people disappear, 17 year old protagonist, Adriane Stohl, is already a person of interest, thanks to her father, when she commits to writing a speech that challenges and questions the current societal norms. The speech is not delivered, but Adriane finds herself in hot water and having to pay a heavy price. She is punished by being sent back in time ' teletransported' to North America, Wainscotia, Wisconsin, to be reschooled in 1959. Adriane treads gingerly, understandably cautious about the nature of the world she finds herself in.
Oates vibrantly brings alive this period of time, with its hair rollers, manual typewriters etc., all of which proves to be a revelation to Adriane. Love is to beckon in the form of a fellow exile as indeed does rebellion. These turn out to be turbulent times as questioning of society and challenging the status quo is everywhere. This is a time of the Civil Rights movement, women's rights, anti-war protests and more. Oates provides the opportunity to deduce parallels and connections to the madness in our contemporary world and the state of US politics, the nature of history and questions of what reality might be. Some people might find this a heavy handed read, but I found it thought provoking, if depressing, in its echoes of real life politics and divisions in our society. Many thanks to HarperCollins 4th Estate for an ARC.
Oates vibrantly brings alive this period of time, with its hair rollers, manual typewriters etc., all of which proves to be a revelation to Adriane. Love is to beckon in the form of a fellow exile as indeed does rebellion. These turn out to be turbulent times as questioning of society and challenging the status quo is everywhere. This is a time of the Civil Rights movement, women's rights, anti-war protests and more. Oates provides the opportunity to deduce parallels and connections to the madness in our contemporary world and the state of US politics, the nature of history and questions of what reality might be. Some people might find this a heavy handed read, but I found it thought provoking, if depressing, in its echoes of real life politics and divisions in our society. Many thanks to HarperCollins 4th Estate for an ARC.
February 12, 2019
Few stories descend from interesting to irritating to irrational to despicable as this. Ugh! 0 of 10 stars
November 26, 2021
Much more Young Adult than I expected and with an ending that felt to me like the author didn’t know what she wanted to convey
We are what we are made to be - we must only not resist
We follow Adriane Strohl, later a.k.a. Mary Ellen Enright, the slightly too inquisitive and naive main character who is growing up in a kind of Panem from The Hunger Games, but slightly more technologically advanced and abbreviation obsessed. These Reconstituted North American States are even ruled from a Capitol. Joyce Carol Oates uses quite a lot of infodumping to sketch the world but still this felt more or less generic YA like Slated or something. Also our bright and curious Adriane apparently does not know how to keep a low profile and is rather often surprised by the dystopian state she lived in her whole life, for instance thinking It had not occurred to me that this was Treason-Speech, or that it was Questioning Authority.
Still I breezed through the first part of the book, where our narrator is condemned to be send back to the past and live a few years in the 1950's on a Midwest university.
I mean, that is quite an original premise and I could imagine the culture shock and stuff. But here Adriane, reconstituted as Mary Ellen, acts like a kind of extremely homesick Hermione Granger and the world with imbedded sexism and racism hardly comes into the story.
The whole typical YA narrative of a) I'm different and b) I have a huge crush on someone continues.
At least her love interest Ira Wolfman has a bit more common sense (The ‘right thing to do’ is to survive, Mary Ellen. You know that). And some of the observations on "science" being superseded by new knowledge are interesting enough, for instance Adriane thinks about psychology classes: Borderline personality - which made me wonder who controlled and defined the border.
I kind of get the link the author tries to make between behaviorism and McCarthy like witch hunts in relation to our current techno dystopian visions of near future. But the approach is heavy handed, everything at the university is rather as one would expect, there is no diversity of thoughts and opinions, no one raises questions, and the era is thus only sketchley and in a bit of cliched manner drawn.
And finally: as a story this novel just doesn't work very well, however easy it reads. Especially as in the last 10% of the book Adriane is just doing over what she does the entire book already with Ira, fostering an enormous crush and with some suggestion of the Matrix thrown into the mix.
I like dystopian fiction, even though people might look down on it as a genre.
Hazards of Time Travel fits snuggly with the 2019 Booker longlisted The Wall of John Lanchester in showing that "serious" authors don't always get these stories right, and that more is required than a formulaic approach.
We are what we are made to be - we must only not resist
We follow Adriane Strohl, later a.k.a. Mary Ellen Enright, the slightly too inquisitive and naive main character who is growing up in a kind of Panem from The Hunger Games, but slightly more technologically advanced and abbreviation obsessed. These Reconstituted North American States are even ruled from a Capitol. Joyce Carol Oates uses quite a lot of infodumping to sketch the world but still this felt more or less generic YA like Slated or something. Also our bright and curious Adriane apparently does not know how to keep a low profile and is rather often surprised by the dystopian state she lived in her whole life, for instance thinking It had not occurred to me that this was Treason-Speech, or that it was Questioning Authority.
Still I breezed through the first part of the book, where our narrator is condemned to be send back to the past and live a few years in the 1950's on a Midwest university.
I mean, that is quite an original premise and I could imagine the culture shock and stuff. But here Adriane, reconstituted as Mary Ellen, acts like a kind of extremely homesick Hermione Granger and the world with imbedded sexism and racism hardly comes into the story.
The whole typical YA narrative of a) I'm different and b) I have a huge crush on someone continues.
At least her love interest Ira Wolfman has a bit more common sense (The ‘right thing to do’ is to survive, Mary Ellen. You know that). And some of the observations on "science" being superseded by new knowledge are interesting enough, for instance Adriane thinks about psychology classes: Borderline personality - which made me wonder who controlled and defined the border.
I kind of get the link the author tries to make between behaviorism and McCarthy like witch hunts in relation to our current techno dystopian visions of near future. But the approach is heavy handed, everything at the university is rather as one would expect, there is no diversity of thoughts and opinions, no one raises questions, and the era is thus only sketchley and in a bit of cliched manner drawn.
And finally: as a story this novel just doesn't work very well, however easy it reads. Especially as in the last 10% of the book Adriane is just doing over what she does the entire book already with Ira, fostering an enormous crush and with some suggestion of the Matrix thrown into the mix.
I like dystopian fiction, even though people might look down on it as a genre.
Hazards of Time Travel fits snuggly with the 2019 Booker longlisted The Wall of John Lanchester in showing that "serious" authors don't always get these stories right, and that more is required than a formulaic approach.
October 11, 2018
Well, this is weird! As a huge JCO fan, one of the things that I love about her is that she's *not* simply re-writing the same book over and over - the variety in her output is hugely impressive. This one, though, is a bit of a puzzle... though a playful, slightly mischievous one despite the serious theme of political authoritarianism.
It starts as a homage to 1984 with a kind of 'Sovietisation' of the US: acronyms of bureaucratic bodies abound, people can be 'disappeared' and free thought is severely circumscribed. Adriane, our 17 year old narrator, upsets the regime by openly (and naively?) questioning their authority and is punished by being whisked back to university in 1959 Wisconsin (the place where JCO herself studied for her MA in the early 1960s).
Cue some 'is that how people lived' scenes (typewriters! hair curlers!) and some interesting wandering down psychological theories of selfhood. JCO seems to be taking a swipe at the plethora of YA dystopias where a young woman falls in insta- love and leads a rebellion: in this book, that 'love' is subjected to a subtle interrogation and the rebellion segues into student politics of the 1960s: anti-nuclear weapons, pro civil rights.
But then, things take a surprising turn and the final section reminds us that one of the qualities we love about JCO is her boldness.
This is an allusive novel: 1984, Stalinism, the Divergent trilogy, The Matrix, The Handmaid's Tale, The Bell Jar, Trump's America and the concomitant nostalgia for the 1950s when, allegedly, pesky women/non-whites/communists/Jews etc. etc. were kept in their place (even as, ironically, western society was agitating for more inclusive, socially-just ways of being).
There are places where this feels like it's lost its way; and then, bam, JCO hits us with a revelation that both amuses and also changes everything. I disagree with the early reviews I've seen which peg this as a YA novel: it may have a YA narrator and gesture towards some of the tropes of that genre, but it deconstructs as much as it re-uses and makes productive capital from the interactions.
This is not JCO at her best and may not be the best place to start if you haven't read her before - but by the end, I was entertained and stimulated by her witty and rather wicked take on contemporary literary trends and modern US politics.
Many thanks to 4th Estate for an ARC via NetGalley
It starts as a homage to 1984 with a kind of 'Sovietisation' of the US: acronyms of bureaucratic bodies abound, people can be 'disappeared' and free thought is severely circumscribed. Adriane, our 17 year old narrator, upsets the regime by openly (and naively?) questioning their authority and is punished by being whisked back to university in 1959 Wisconsin (the place where JCO herself studied for her MA in the early 1960s).
Cue some 'is that how people lived' scenes (typewriters! hair curlers!) and some interesting wandering down psychological theories of selfhood. JCO seems to be taking a swipe at the plethora of YA dystopias where a young woman falls in insta- love and leads a rebellion: in this book, that 'love' is subjected to a subtle interrogation and the rebellion segues into student politics of the 1960s: anti-nuclear weapons, pro civil rights.
But then, things take a surprising turn and the final section reminds us that one of the qualities we love about JCO is her boldness.
This is an allusive novel: 1984, Stalinism, the Divergent trilogy, The Matrix, The Handmaid's Tale, The Bell Jar, Trump's America and the concomitant nostalgia for the 1950s when, allegedly, pesky women/non-whites/communists/Jews etc. etc. were kept in their place (even as, ironically, western society was agitating for more inclusive, socially-just ways of being).
There are places where this feels like it's lost its way; and then, bam, JCO hits us with a revelation that both amuses and also changes everything. I disagree with the early reviews I've seen which peg this as a YA novel: it may have a YA narrator and gesture towards some of the tropes of that genre, but it deconstructs as much as it re-uses and makes productive capital from the interactions.
This is not JCO at her best and may not be the best place to start if you haven't read her before - but by the end, I was entertained and stimulated by her witty and rather wicked take on contemporary literary trends and modern US politics.
Many thanks to 4th Estate for an ARC via NetGalley
December 6, 2018
Given the incredible reputation of Joyce Carol Oates for writing books that people love, I simply cannot believe how terrible this book is. I rarely rate books this low, but I can find nothing positive to write about this novel, honestly. (Oh, I guess I can say that I'm glad it wasn't longer?)
Coming from a former school librarian who has read and loved hundreds of YA sci fi and fantasy novels, and who has graduate-level training (really!) in being able to "book talk" virtually any book in a positive way to encourage reading...admitting that I can find nothing positive to write about this novel is really a dramatic statement for me to write!
The dystopian future world in which the book begins is poorly developed, with an alphabet soup of acronyms cluttering the pages that seem so forced and silly as to be laughable. The main character seems to be floating through the events that unfold with life simply happening to her, and when she does set about doing things in an active way, that's not a step in a positive direction. She sets about stalking her teacher, working like a slave for him doing his dishes and ironing his shirts hoping that he will "need" her because she believes she loves him. Sigh. The time travel elements are not interesting or well-explored, being treated only in an "oh gee" kind of manner. "Oh, gee...the young women in the 1950's type on...gasp...typewriters!" "Oh, gee...the young women in the 1950's sleep on...gasp...hair rollers!" "Oh, gee...the young women in the 1950's have salaries that are...gasp...less than men's!" Etcetera...ad nauseum.
To top off all of the awfulness, the book ends with a badly written, yawn-inducing "cliff hanger" of sorts (although there's no precarious situation or difficult dilemma) where we are left wondering what the heck happened to the rest of the book. Did Joyce Carol Oates get bored writing it and just stop, unable to make herself finish because she was as tired of her characters as I was? Did she become ill while writing it and decide she just didn't have the strength to finish it? (Doubtful, since she's on social media 24/7.) Did she decide that she'd rather spend her time writing an actually good book and just quit writing this one because she realized she'd already wasted enough of her time on it?
I don't have an answer for the terrible ending, but I do have some advice: Find a different book to read that isn't this one. There are hundreds of really great YA sci fi and fantasy novels out there, many with time travel elements handled much more skillfully.
I wish I could have back the hours I spent reading this one. Consider saving you from reading this book my Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Years gifts to you, potential reader.
Coming from a former school librarian who has read and loved hundreds of YA sci fi and fantasy novels, and who has graduate-level training (really!) in being able to "book talk" virtually any book in a positive way to encourage reading...admitting that I can find nothing positive to write about this novel is really a dramatic statement for me to write!
The dystopian future world in which the book begins is poorly developed, with an alphabet soup of acronyms cluttering the pages that seem so forced and silly as to be laughable. The main character seems to be floating through the events that unfold with life simply happening to her, and when she does set about doing things in an active way, that's not a step in a positive direction. She sets about stalking her teacher, working like a slave for him doing his dishes and ironing his shirts hoping that he will "need" her because she believes she loves him. Sigh. The time travel elements are not interesting or well-explored, being treated only in an "oh gee" kind of manner. "Oh, gee...the young women in the 1950's type on...gasp...typewriters!" "Oh, gee...the young women in the 1950's sleep on...gasp...hair rollers!" "Oh, gee...the young women in the 1950's have salaries that are...gasp...less than men's!" Etcetera...ad nauseum.
To top off all of the awfulness, the book ends with a badly written, yawn-inducing "cliff hanger" of sorts (although there's no precarious situation or difficult dilemma) where we are left wondering what the heck happened to the rest of the book. Did Joyce Carol Oates get bored writing it and just stop, unable to make herself finish because she was as tired of her characters as I was? Did she become ill while writing it and decide she just didn't have the strength to finish it? (Doubtful, since she's on social media 24/7.) Did she decide that she'd rather spend her time writing an actually good book and just quit writing this one because she realized she'd already wasted enough of her time on it?
I don't have an answer for the terrible ending, but I do have some advice: Find a different book to read that isn't this one. There are hundreds of really great YA sci fi and fantasy novels out there, many with time travel elements handled much more skillfully.
I wish I could have back the hours I spent reading this one. Consider saving you from reading this book my Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Years gifts to you, potential reader.
May 1, 2019
I'm shuffling back and forth between giving this 4 stars or 5. I enjoyed it immensely but the end! No, just no! C'mon, Joyce Carol Oates! Couldn't we have had a better ending that neatly wrapped up the story? Oh, and the romance thrown in.... I could have done without that too. Thankfully the romance does not overpower the story, and it's not all flowery and grotesque. Still, I could have done without that; I just am not a fan of romance.
OK, bitching aside, this is a terrific story! It is set in what is now called the North American States and encompasses Canada, Mexico, and the USA) in the very near future. A surveillance state has taken over, the country run by billionaires or their associates (sound familiar??!). Indeed, rather than actually having an election, the president is chosen by who is able to raise the most money. Intellectuals pose a threat to this Big Brother state; children are encouraged to not think for themselves or to excel in school. Scientific facts are mostly secrets of the state and reading material is strictly censored.
When 17 year old Adriane delivers her high school's graduation valedictorian speech, she poses 12 questions to her fellow graduates. For this "crime" she is sentenced to be an EI, an Exiled Individual. EIs are sent back in time to 1959, Wainscotia, Wisconsin. Here, Adriane - now Mary Ellen - attends university, surrounded by people who seem foreign to her. They speak English but differently, they smoke, they live without the internet, cell phones, and all the other modern day technology we now think of as crucial. "Mary Ellen" is forbidden to get close to anyone, to disclose who she really is. She is threatened with deletion should she not follow any of the instructions she is given.
The book is philosophical, exploring the notion of free will and the question of nurture vs. nature. It is intriguing and thought-provoking. Time travel stories don't often work for me but this is an exception. It is also beautifully written and with awesome character development. In spite of the 2 complaints I listed in the beginning, I think I'll award this 5 stars after all for the enjoyment it gave me, and the ways in which it made me think. Highly recommend to those who love dystopia and/or novels that make you think! Also, though the main character is 17 at the onset of the story, I wouldn't classify this as a young adult book. It's written as an adult book, and as such I'm sure I enjoyed it more than had it been YA.
November 30, 2021
The Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates is something different. This most prolific of authors seems to jump around writing about all sorts of genres – and to me, that makes her constantly exciting.
This little dystopian beauty is initially set in America in 2039 and we follow the life of 17-year-old Adriane Strohl. She lives in a new America (NAS – Northern America States, an amalgam of Mexico, Canada, and the US) run by a small group of immensely wealthy individuals (sound familiar?) who hold absolute power over the populous.
Oates hurls a countless definitions and acronyms at the reader initially – terms such as MI – Marked Individual, these poor sods had to express gratitude to the powers at be for being exonerated of their crimes, these were often trivial offences by our standards. There’s the EI – Exiled Individuals, whereby, for slightly more serious misdemeanours one was exiled to another place for a period. EI’s were given new identities, new lives, and a whole swag of stringent requirements they must follow. For more serious crimes, the individual was vapourised, terminated into oblivion even. Nasty stuff. They also had a Caste Rating system - CR. Whereby CR1 people were white and CR10 were black and the remaining 8 CRs were every shade in between. How horrible is that?
Anyway, Adriane’s graduation speech (in 2039) put her in a spot of bother, our protagonist always had an energetic mind and loved pushing the boundaries. The result was, she became an EI and was transported back to 1959 North-Midwest States in an area that was known as Wisconsin. Adriane couldn’t move more than 10 miles away from the centre of town, she was given a new name and was an undergraduate at the local university. The debates in psychology 101 were fascinating and had me scurrying for other resources, some of the debates were great to read. An acceptable student couldn’t really deviate from the norm and a standard pass, standard answers to standard questions was all that was needed. No challenging thoughts and ideas in this world thank you very much.
One of the most interesting aspects of this story was Adriane experiencing 1950s Christian Conservatism – some of the stale thinking. Her experience with hair rollers (we call them curlers – not as though I use them, I read it somewhere) for the first time was interesting, something she had to do while sleeping, yikes!!!!! She also used a proper typewriter for the first time – some of us know what they are – clackity, clack. I think Adriane found the young women in 1959 to be a tad insipid (for want of a better word), unfair? Perhaps. Also, there often seemed to be a haze of blue cigarette smoke around the place – you get the picture? Oates painted a vivid world.
Adriane came across many people during her exile, some she suspected are fellow EI’s – but even mentioning the fact one is an EI can lead to being vapourised/terminated. Yep, this is a true dystopian nightmare. There’s also the question, is this a real world? Or is it all just a dream?
This work had a suffocating impact on me.
There is so much more to say, BUT I don’t want to give anything away, apart from saying I was utterly engrossed in this story. Initially, I was put off with the procession of abstract definitions and the mixed reviews this work has received . But after the first quarter I settled in, and towards the end I was fully strapped in, locked and loaded, teeth gritted, pedal to the metal, goggles on with my luscious locks blowing around – some may say, all wind-swept and interesting. I was there!!!!!!! It was bloody brilliant – what a year this has been and what a writer JCO is.
Look out Patty – there I said it. Brilliant.
5-Stars
This little dystopian beauty is initially set in America in 2039 and we follow the life of 17-year-old Adriane Strohl. She lives in a new America (NAS – Northern America States, an amalgam of Mexico, Canada, and the US) run by a small group of immensely wealthy individuals (sound familiar?) who hold absolute power over the populous.
Oates hurls a countless definitions and acronyms at the reader initially – terms such as MI – Marked Individual, these poor sods had to express gratitude to the powers at be for being exonerated of their crimes, these were often trivial offences by our standards. There’s the EI – Exiled Individuals, whereby, for slightly more serious misdemeanours one was exiled to another place for a period. EI’s were given new identities, new lives, and a whole swag of stringent requirements they must follow. For more serious crimes, the individual was vapourised, terminated into oblivion even. Nasty stuff. They also had a Caste Rating system - CR. Whereby CR1 people were white and CR10 were black and the remaining 8 CRs were every shade in between. How horrible is that?
Anyway, Adriane’s graduation speech (in 2039) put her in a spot of bother, our protagonist always had an energetic mind and loved pushing the boundaries. The result was, she became an EI and was transported back to 1959 North-Midwest States in an area that was known as Wisconsin. Adriane couldn’t move more than 10 miles away from the centre of town, she was given a new name and was an undergraduate at the local university. The debates in psychology 101 were fascinating and had me scurrying for other resources, some of the debates were great to read. An acceptable student couldn’t really deviate from the norm and a standard pass, standard answers to standard questions was all that was needed. No challenging thoughts and ideas in this world thank you very much.
One of the most interesting aspects of this story was Adriane experiencing 1950s Christian Conservatism – some of the stale thinking. Her experience with hair rollers (we call them curlers – not as though I use them, I read it somewhere) for the first time was interesting, something she had to do while sleeping, yikes!!!!! She also used a proper typewriter for the first time – some of us know what they are – clackity, clack. I think Adriane found the young women in 1959 to be a tad insipid (for want of a better word), unfair? Perhaps. Also, there often seemed to be a haze of blue cigarette smoke around the place – you get the picture? Oates painted a vivid world.
Adriane came across many people during her exile, some she suspected are fellow EI’s – but even mentioning the fact one is an EI can lead to being vapourised/terminated. Yep, this is a true dystopian nightmare. There’s also the question, is this a real world? Or is it all just a dream?
This work had a suffocating impact on me.
There is so much more to say, BUT I don’t want to give anything away, apart from saying I was utterly engrossed in this story. Initially, I was put off with the procession of abstract definitions and the mixed reviews this work has received . But after the first quarter I settled in, and towards the end I was fully strapped in, locked and loaded, teeth gritted, pedal to the metal, goggles on with my luscious locks blowing around – some may say, all wind-swept and interesting. I was there!!!!!!! It was bloody brilliant – what a year this has been and what a writer JCO is.
Look out Patty – there I said it. Brilliant.
5-Stars
November 24, 2018
It’s a common trope in Young Adult novels to feature a teenage protagonist in a dystopian future who is penalized for fighting against an oppressive system. That’s exactly the story Joyce Carol Oates writes in her new novel HAZARDS OF TIME TRAVEL. However, this is not a Young Adult novel. Oates is certainly familiar with the form and nature of YA fiction having written several books in this genre. It’d be natural to assume that she’s utilizing her expertise in this form and is also making a departure from her typically realistic fiction to branch into feminist dystopian fiction. There is a cycle of novels in this form particularly prevalent in literature today (as described by Alexandra Alter in a recent New York Times article ‘How Feminist Dystopian Fiction is Channeling Women’s Anger and Anxiety’ in which she cites Oates’s novel.) But the journey and outcome of Oates’s highly unusual new novel is much more startling and darkly subversive than any tale that could be categorized as Young Adult. Instead, HAZARDS OF TIME TRAVEL engages with ideas of behavioural psychology and Cold War politics to form an utterly unique commentary on society today. It also incorporates many autobiographical elements which surprisingly might make it one of Oates’s most personal and reflective novels yet.
Read my full review of Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates on LonesomeReader
Read my full review of Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates on LonesomeReader
February 18, 2019
Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates is a scifi/dystopian novel that deals in time travel. This one started off reminding me a bit of Divergent with the main character getting in trouble for not being like everyone else and questioning things. She ends up getting sent back in time as punishment. Well, that was where it just kind of slowed to a crawl for me, the beginning seemed like it was going to be good but I ended up with one of those why isn't anything else happening feelings. A lot of folks like this one but I guess i just wanted more futuristic or time traveling than it contained.
For more reviews please visit https://carriesbookreviews.com/
For more reviews please visit https://carriesbookreviews.com/
November 20, 2019
WTF did I just read? And what in the name of all that's literary did the reviews read? Because as far as I can tell, none of the reviews actually read this book, or, if they did, they read a completely different book, one with a coherent and interesting plotline, and not this hot mess of an attempt at Dystopia.
Here's the thing - and I've made the same case repeatedly with several other works - about dystopian fiction; stop using dystopian fiction as your one-pass ticket into genre, mainstream authors. Just. Please. Stop. You don't like us, sci-fi nerds, you disdain our genre and the incredible amounts of work done in it, you want to be literary, and, as a result, you write godawful, ridiculous, unreadable sci-fi, which somehow gets praised as amazing by the entirety of the media world.
Which, again, I am not sure has even read the book at all. Let me give you an example: half the reviews I've seen talk about the 'defiant protagonist' of the future dystopia. Well, she's not. She's a clueless impulsive idiot who can memorize but not deduce, ask questions out of naivete but not, apparently, actual intelligence. She becomes class valedictorian because she literally "forgets" to keep her grades down, and then writes an anti-dystopian valedictorian address because she fails to pay attention to all the warning signs everybody else is desperately trying to telegraph at her. And that's the point! That's literally the point of the book's premise! If you somehow managed to construe defiance out of this hunted rabbit little girl, you were obviously reading 1984 and using the dust jacket of this book for a cover by accident.
The worldbuilding for the book begins in a somewhat trivial, but at least relevant, kind of totalitarian Handmaid's Tale-esque Reconstructed New American Stated, or NAS, because everything needs an acronym, which meanders confusedly between plutocracy, technocracy, and Christian dictatorship without any overt religious symbolism. Okay. Inconsistent, banal and done to death, plus so many acronyms you could scream, but interesting and fun in a quick read kind of way. Then everything disintegrates into little slivers of sobbing sci-fi when the protagonist (narrator? empty slate? whatever) is punished for her crimes by being sent into the past, to 1959.
But, like, why?
Why do they use time travel as a method of punishment? How is life in the past supposed to reeducate or indoctrinate the EI (Exiled Individual, FYI). We see zero evidence of reeducation aside from one single possibly-implanted, possibly-hallucinated fake memory. How does such an obviously resource-heavy and risky method even work? Why aren't the horrible mean plutocrats just tossing the Exiles into a prison camp in Afghanistan? There are hints that some of the exiled persons return, rehabilitated, but we see no follow-up on this potentially really interesting plotline, either to confirm or deny it. The only reason I can think of to use that specific plot device is that Oates wants to move away as fast as she possible can from the uncomfortable sci-fi territory and into the "realistic" setting of the late fifties' humdrum university campus. And that is a horrible, horrible reason to structure plot.
The rest of the book is spent in sheep-like bewilderment in 1959. Oates tries to tackle themes of forgetting and Free Will, but does so rather badly. She meanders between hatred for anti-scientific attitudes, distdain for Creationists and the religious environment - to the point where the people speaking sound like parodies, not like any religious people I've met - and relativism that wants science to die and never bother her again. She's trying really hard to eat the cake, and then have it too. Her meditations about the problems of Skinnerian behaviorism, and the validity of the inner world - with a wink and a nudge to the Cognitive Revolution - disregard the fact that no Cognitive Scientist would ever speak of a 'soul'or delineate a definitive free will and emotional state that is independent of the brain, or free from materialism. Cognitive psychology is a positivist science, you know.
Her attempt at philosophical discourse and portrayal of intellectual independence find outlets in the weirdest way possible; for instance, the protagonist chooses to impress her Heathcliff-like love interest with a discoursive essay about the effect of SAkinner on 20th century psychology, by writing a skeptical essay in the voice of a rat in a maze. The guy gives her a C - as punishment, Oates says, for daring to be different, but, frankly, if I were her professor, I'd give her a D, for obnoxiousness. Wonderful essay, write it in your next creative writing workshop; while you're in the psychology class, please answer the damn questions on the subject of psychology.
Oates' approach to the past and the future is characterized by this maudlin condescension that picks and chooses the things she wants to be an intellectual snob about. Positivist science? Out. Paper books? Very much in. The protagonist talks at length about the difference between these weird "paper" books that don't turn off as soon as power is out (because apparently the NAS banned the concept of a "battery"), and talks of how one can become emotionally attached to the paper versions. Well, you know what? I can get attached to the e-book versions, too, because I get emotionally attached to the content of a book, and not to the paper fibers it's made out of. Take that, author.
I didn't even get into the creepy, repetitive, massively problematic love story aspect of this book. I didn't even get into the what the hell ending of it. I do want to get into the actual writing, which people might call "stripped down" or evocative, but which, for me, evoked zero things, and managed to reiterate the same idea time after time in an almost childish language.
My biggest pet peeve of the book, though? The quotation marks. Holy hell, the quotation marks. Everything is inserted into these annoying, unnecessary quotation marks. The protagonist is referred to as "Mary Ellen" even by people who have no reason to think she is called anything else, terms such as "nuclear holocaust" are inserted in quotes even which people are yelling about them, even the most ordinary things are for some reason in quotes. The protagonist says, for example, (paraphrased) I am in the past now, what did my "Grade Point Average" matter? Come on! It's called a Grade Point Average! That's its name! Could you disdain it without quotations?
For example there's this gem:
... Wolfman laughed. “You’re a sensible girl, ‘Mary Ellen.’ Of course, you’re right. Our parents would not have been born, consequently we wouldn’t have been born, in the ‘future,’ if there’d been a ‘holocaust’ in this past. So yes, you are absolutely correct.”
Or this:
...To punish ‘free thinkers’ for subversion they sentence us to ‘the Good Place’—Wainscotia. One of those idyllic American campuses in the Heartland where no research or creative work comes to anything. No matter how much effort is poured into it, how much ‘talent’ and ‘perseverance.’ Perfectly intelligent scientists originally from decent East Coast universities here take disastrous turns, wind up in dead-ends—and won’t realize it until they’re embalmed and can’t leave. No one is ‘original’ here—no one is ‘significant.’ A promising young astrophysicist from Cal Tech gave up his Ph.D. project in ‘string theory’ to pursue ‘extra-terrestrial life’—that’s it for him, until he retires.
Even here, where the terms are obviously meant to be sarcastic, there's just such an overabundance of them that they lose the sarcasm effect, and just become irritation, and the whole "book" is "like this", filled with "qutes" and sometimes, even " 'quotes' within quotes". Honestly, I barely managed to read the ending through the endless quotes.
I am all for dystopias, but when an author comes in with, essentially, no understanding of sci-fi as a broad genre and the things it did, and how to structure a proper story with elements of speculative nature in it, we just get this; boring, repetitive, absurdly haughty and just plain bad.
Here's the thing - and I've made the same case repeatedly with several other works - about dystopian fiction; stop using dystopian fiction as your one-pass ticket into genre, mainstream authors. Just. Please. Stop. You don't like us, sci-fi nerds, you disdain our genre and the incredible amounts of work done in it, you want to be literary, and, as a result, you write godawful, ridiculous, unreadable sci-fi, which somehow gets praised as amazing by the entirety of the media world.
Which, again, I am not sure has even read the book at all. Let me give you an example: half the reviews I've seen talk about the 'defiant protagonist' of the future dystopia. Well, she's not. She's a clueless impulsive idiot who can memorize but not deduce, ask questions out of naivete but not, apparently, actual intelligence. She becomes class valedictorian because she literally "forgets" to keep her grades down, and then writes an anti-dystopian valedictorian address because she fails to pay attention to all the warning signs everybody else is desperately trying to telegraph at her. And that's the point! That's literally the point of the book's premise! If you somehow managed to construe defiance out of this hunted rabbit little girl, you were obviously reading 1984 and using the dust jacket of this book for a cover by accident.
The worldbuilding for the book begins in a somewhat trivial, but at least relevant, kind of totalitarian Handmaid's Tale-esque Reconstructed New American Stated, or NAS, because everything needs an acronym, which meanders confusedly between plutocracy, technocracy, and Christian dictatorship without any overt religious symbolism. Okay. Inconsistent, banal and done to death, plus so many acronyms you could scream, but interesting and fun in a quick read kind of way. Then everything disintegrates into little slivers of sobbing sci-fi when the protagonist (narrator? empty slate? whatever) is punished for her crimes by being sent into the past, to 1959.
But, like, why?
Why do they use time travel as a method of punishment? How is life in the past supposed to reeducate or indoctrinate the EI (Exiled Individual, FYI). We see zero evidence of reeducation aside from one single possibly-implanted, possibly-hallucinated fake memory. How does such an obviously resource-heavy and risky method even work? Why aren't the horrible mean plutocrats just tossing the Exiles into a prison camp in Afghanistan? There are hints that some of the exiled persons return, rehabilitated, but we see no follow-up on this potentially really interesting plotline, either to confirm or deny it. The only reason I can think of to use that specific plot device is that Oates wants to move away as fast as she possible can from the uncomfortable sci-fi territory and into the "realistic" setting of the late fifties' humdrum university campus. And that is a horrible, horrible reason to structure plot.
The rest of the book is spent in sheep-like bewilderment in 1959. Oates tries to tackle themes of forgetting and Free Will, but does so rather badly. She meanders between hatred for anti-scientific attitudes, distdain for Creationists and the religious environment - to the point where the people speaking sound like parodies, not like any religious people I've met - and relativism that wants science to die and never bother her again. She's trying really hard to eat the cake, and then have it too. Her meditations about the problems of Skinnerian behaviorism, and the validity of the inner world - with a wink and a nudge to the Cognitive Revolution - disregard the fact that no Cognitive Scientist would ever speak of a 'soul'or delineate a definitive free will and emotional state that is independent of the brain, or free from materialism. Cognitive psychology is a positivist science, you know.
Her attempt at philosophical discourse and portrayal of intellectual independence find outlets in the weirdest way possible; for instance, the protagonist chooses to impress her Heathcliff-like love interest with a discoursive essay about the effect of SAkinner on 20th century psychology, by writing a skeptical essay in the voice of a rat in a maze. The guy gives her a C - as punishment, Oates says, for daring to be different, but, frankly, if I were her professor, I'd give her a D, for obnoxiousness. Wonderful essay, write it in your next creative writing workshop; while you're in the psychology class, please answer the damn questions on the subject of psychology.
Oates' approach to the past and the future is characterized by this maudlin condescension that picks and chooses the things she wants to be an intellectual snob about. Positivist science? Out. Paper books? Very much in. The protagonist talks at length about the difference between these weird "paper" books that don't turn off as soon as power is out (because apparently the NAS banned the concept of a "battery"), and talks of how one can become emotionally attached to the paper versions. Well, you know what? I can get attached to the e-book versions, too, because I get emotionally attached to the content of a book, and not to the paper fibers it's made out of. Take that, author.
I didn't even get into the creepy, repetitive, massively problematic love story aspect of this book. I didn't even get into the what the hell ending of it. I do want to get into the actual writing, which people might call "stripped down" or evocative, but which, for me, evoked zero things, and managed to reiterate the same idea time after time in an almost childish language.
My biggest pet peeve of the book, though? The quotation marks. Holy hell, the quotation marks. Everything is inserted into these annoying, unnecessary quotation marks. The protagonist is referred to as "Mary Ellen" even by people who have no reason to think she is called anything else, terms such as "nuclear holocaust" are inserted in quotes even which people are yelling about them, even the most ordinary things are for some reason in quotes. The protagonist says, for example, (paraphrased) I am in the past now, what did my "Grade Point Average" matter? Come on! It's called a Grade Point Average! That's its name! Could you disdain it without quotations?
For example there's this gem:
... Wolfman laughed. “You’re a sensible girl, ‘Mary Ellen.’ Of course, you’re right. Our parents would not have been born, consequently we wouldn’t have been born, in the ‘future,’ if there’d been a ‘holocaust’ in this past. So yes, you are absolutely correct.”
Or this:
...To punish ‘free thinkers’ for subversion they sentence us to ‘the Good Place’—Wainscotia. One of those idyllic American campuses in the Heartland where no research or creative work comes to anything. No matter how much effort is poured into it, how much ‘talent’ and ‘perseverance.’ Perfectly intelligent scientists originally from decent East Coast universities here take disastrous turns, wind up in dead-ends—and won’t realize it until they’re embalmed and can’t leave. No one is ‘original’ here—no one is ‘significant.’ A promising young astrophysicist from Cal Tech gave up his Ph.D. project in ‘string theory’ to pursue ‘extra-terrestrial life’—that’s it for him, until he retires.
Even here, where the terms are obviously meant to be sarcastic, there's just such an overabundance of them that they lose the sarcasm effect, and just become irritation, and the whole "book" is "like this", filled with "qutes" and sometimes, even " 'quotes' within quotes". Honestly, I barely managed to read the ending through the endless quotes.
I am all for dystopias, but when an author comes in with, essentially, no understanding of sci-fi as a broad genre and the things it did, and how to structure a proper story with elements of speculative nature in it, we just get this; boring, repetitive, absurdly haughty and just plain bad.
October 16, 2018
Just finished and no idea how to rate it (yet). Some parts were brilliant but others left me deeply unsatisfied.
After the re-read: No more dissatisfaction. Not a flawless book maybe, but overall: brilliant.
4,5*, rounded up to 5.
After the re-read: No more dissatisfaction. Not a flawless book maybe, but overall: brilliant.
4,5*, rounded up to 5.
September 18, 2018
Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates is a dystopian novel that gives a scary look into the future where everything you say and do is closely monitored. A young girl is sent to another time for four years as a punishment for going against the rules.
I found this book disturbing and thought provoking.
I would like to thank NetGalley and HarperCollins UK, 4th Estate, William Collins for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.
I found this book disturbing and thought provoking.
I would like to thank NetGalley and HarperCollins UK, 4th Estate, William Collins for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.
December 6, 2018
I’d even tried to write what were called “stories”—following the pattern of the Nine Basic Plots we were provided, along with vocabulary lists and recommended titles. We were not allowed to take books out of the public library marked A—for Adult; we were restricted to YA, Young Adult, which had to be approved by the Youth Entertainment Board, and were really suitable for grade school. My parents had had Adult Books at one time, but I had never seen them.
My thanks to HarperCollins UK for an ARC via NetGalley.
I requested the ARC as I had seen this book listed as possible early contender for the 2019 Booker and as I understand that the author is a well known and well regarded literary author. Unfortunately to my disappointment this was a Young Adult novel, and very much at the young end of that market and not one with which I could interact.
The first part of the book posits a totalitarian state, which emerged from the USA as a result of the crackdown on civil liberties arising from the 9/11 attacks. The protagonist of the novel (and I choose that word carefully as YA novels tend to have protagonists) is Adriane Stohl, already under watch due to her father, a Doctor who has been demoted to a lowly medical job due to subversive behaviour. When Adrianne – a dangerously unconventional student at a time when conformity and unquestioning obedience is expected – rehearses a mildly questioning speech – she is herself detained and classified as an EI (Exiled Individual) transported into exile – an exile which as the title of the book suggests is actually (backwards) through time to 1950s middle-America.
In the first part of the book JCO (Joyce Carol Oates) in true YA (Young Adult) style describes in a FCW (Fairly Clunky Way) the DFW (Dystopian Fantasy World) she has created – one where the true horror seems to be the number of acronyms. A typical passage is
There had been only a few DASTADs—Disciplinary Actions Securing Threats Against Democracy—taken against Pennsboro students in recent years, and these students had all been boys in category ST3 or below. (The highest ST—SkinTone—category was 1: “Caucasian.”
Nevertheless the set-up was potentially intriguing – combining time travel (of which many great science fiction stories have been written but which is a trap for the unwary) and dystopian fiction.
It is a potential that is largely wasted in the remaining 85% of the book – as Adrianne (now Mary Ellen) lives in a college and is amazed at things like typewriters, hairsets and smoking while pursuing a rather dreamy romance with one of the tutors, who she believes to be a link to the world she has left. There are some rather half-hearted attempts to link the future totalitarianism to the anti-communist views of the day, as well as some more involved attempts to link them to the research at the time into conditioning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant...).
Overall a harmless book – which I can certainly imagine my 12 year old daughter enjoying as a light read.
November 28, 2018
Someone needs to check Joyce Carol Oates’s garage for a DeLorean.
Her new novel, “Hazards of Time Travel,” seems to have slipped through the space-time continuum. Although Oates started writing it in 2011 and finished before the election of President Trump, the story feels charged by the horrors of our Orwellian era. Even the author sounds a bit freaked out by the prescient quality of this novel. Months ago, she tweeted, “Feeling strange that it will seem to be — obviously! — about T***p Dark Age; in fact, it was/is not since completed years before.”
Perhaps that’s the special instrument of sensitive novelists: a flux capacitor that allows them to register what’s approaching on the horizon. In this case, Oates has recast our present moment as “an Interlude of Indecisiveness,” a period of strident debate about the need for PVIWAT (Patriot Vigilance in the War Against Terror). In the grim future she imagines, the Constitution has been. . . .
To read the full review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
To watch the Totally Hip Video Book Review of this novel, go here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/...
Her new novel, “Hazards of Time Travel,” seems to have slipped through the space-time continuum. Although Oates started writing it in 2011 and finished before the election of President Trump, the story feels charged by the horrors of our Orwellian era. Even the author sounds a bit freaked out by the prescient quality of this novel. Months ago, she tweeted, “Feeling strange that it will seem to be — obviously! — about T***p Dark Age; in fact, it was/is not since completed years before.”
Perhaps that’s the special instrument of sensitive novelists: a flux capacitor that allows them to register what’s approaching on the horizon. In this case, Oates has recast our present moment as “an Interlude of Indecisiveness,” a period of strident debate about the need for PVIWAT (Patriot Vigilance in the War Against Terror). In the grim future she imagines, the Constitution has been. . . .
To read the full review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
To watch the Totally Hip Video Book Review of this novel, go here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/...
January 28, 2019
I am well aware that Joyce Carol Oates is not every reader's cup of tea. I happen to find her brilliant. I have read 18 of her books. I know people who feel as I do about her and I feel friendly towards those people. So I am not so much recommending this novel to any but those JCO lovers. I am wanting to share my thoughts with my JCO tribe.
Ms Oates, as far as I know, had not gone in a post apocalyptic/dystopian direction before. I know she likes to try new things and doesn't worry if she comes out on top of any specific genre. It is exciting to see how she goes about putting her own stamp on whatever she attempts.
In the novels and stories of hers I have read so far, the thing she always, always does is explore emotional and psychological trauma. Hazards of Time Travel follows a female high school senior who has grown up in a future, extremely tightly controlled society. She dares to think for herself in the Valedictorian talk she will give at graduation. Her punishment is banishment to an earlier time, loss of her family and even her own name.
Despite her intelligence and daring, she has been so impregnated with the concepts of her upbringing that her resulting fears never leave her. She is not ever going to be free, whether she stays in 1950s Wisconsin or is allowed to return to her own time and place.
All the details are exactly right. I would not expect anything less. But those details are not just used to orient the reader in the story. They are used to show that the details of daily life, the details of behavioral control, mind control, the details of love and loss, are the very things that keep us trapped, alone, depressed and fearful.
Then there are some odd sentence structures. For me those sentences put me in the minds of the characters. We don't think in carefully constructed sentences, do we? We certainly don't feel emotion in them. Brilliant!
Hazards of Time Travel seems like a Trump timely novel but, according to Ron Charles in his Washington Post review, JCO had started the novel in 2011 and finished it before the 2016 election. I like to think of novelists as our modern day prophets. This book is an example of that.
Ms Oates, as far as I know, had not gone in a post apocalyptic/dystopian direction before. I know she likes to try new things and doesn't worry if she comes out on top of any specific genre. It is exciting to see how she goes about putting her own stamp on whatever she attempts.
In the novels and stories of hers I have read so far, the thing she always, always does is explore emotional and psychological trauma. Hazards of Time Travel follows a female high school senior who has grown up in a future, extremely tightly controlled society. She dares to think for herself in the Valedictorian talk she will give at graduation. Her punishment is banishment to an earlier time, loss of her family and even her own name.
Despite her intelligence and daring, she has been so impregnated with the concepts of her upbringing that her resulting fears never leave her. She is not ever going to be free, whether she stays in 1950s Wisconsin or is allowed to return to her own time and place.
All the details are exactly right. I would not expect anything less. But those details are not just used to orient the reader in the story. They are used to show that the details of daily life, the details of behavioral control, mind control, the details of love and loss, are the very things that keep us trapped, alone, depressed and fearful.
Then there are some odd sentence structures. For me those sentences put me in the minds of the characters. We don't think in carefully constructed sentences, do we? We certainly don't feel emotion in them. Brilliant!
Hazards of Time Travel seems like a Trump timely novel but, according to Ron Charles in his Washington Post review, JCO had started the novel in 2011 and finished it before the 2016 election. I like to think of novelists as our modern day prophets. This book is an example of that.
December 8, 2018
This was my first JCO. I've never been drawn to her before, but a feminist dystopia with time travel? I was there.
Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out what the book was meant to be. It was so bad that I began to think that perhaps it was a satire of the genre, but no. It was just that bad—every relevant trope portrayed in the most cliched way possible, flagrant information dumps, awful dialogue, and a stilted writing style the likes of which I've only ever seen in badly translated books.
Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out what the book was meant to be. It was so bad that I began to think that perhaps it was a satire of the genre, but no. It was just that bad—every relevant trope portrayed in the most cliched way possible, flagrant information dumps, awful dialogue, and a stilted writing style the likes of which I've only ever seen in badly translated books.
December 31, 2019
The book begins with an interesting premise: a young lady from the year 2039 is exiled (via time travel, of course) to 1950s-era Wisconsin as punishment for questioning the status quo of her dystopian society.
With such a great setup (reminiscent of classics like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451), you'd assume an author as legendary as Joyce Carol Oates could lasso herself an engaging story.
Sadly, you would be wrong.
Here are the words that kept coming to mind as I read: boring, bland, devoid of plot, meandering.
The protagonist, who is a burgeoning spitfire in her own futuristic era, loses every shred of gumption almost the second she lands in the past. She latches on to men she admires and essentially becomes an appendage.
And maybe that's the point: a woman who gets the spit kicked out of her by the stifling conformity of two separate eras. But Oates fails to create a distinct devolution, a gradual killing of the will. Really, she fails to create... a story.
Plus, the author provides little resolution at book's end, save for a vague hint of a twist that feels like a recycled and tired version of The Matrix. Mostly, Oates asks questions she doesn't answer and starts threads that are ultimately left to twist in the wind. And she doesn't do it in a Hemingwayesque way that leaves you intrigued by what remains below the surface; rather, she does it in a whogivesashitesque way that makes you wish you'd left this title on the shelf.
With such a great setup (reminiscent of classics like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451), you'd assume an author as legendary as Joyce Carol Oates could lasso herself an engaging story.
Sadly, you would be wrong.
Here are the words that kept coming to mind as I read: boring, bland, devoid of plot, meandering.
The protagonist, who is a burgeoning spitfire in her own futuristic era, loses every shred of gumption almost the second she lands in the past. She latches on to men she admires and essentially becomes an appendage.
And maybe that's the point: a woman who gets the spit kicked out of her by the stifling conformity of two separate eras. But Oates fails to create a distinct devolution, a gradual killing of the will. Really, she fails to create... a story.
Plus, the author provides little resolution at book's end, save for a vague hint of a twist that feels like a recycled and tired version of The Matrix. Mostly, Oates asks questions she doesn't answer and starts threads that are ultimately left to twist in the wind. And she doesn't do it in a Hemingwayesque way that leaves you intrigued by what remains below the surface; rather, she does it in a whogivesashitesque way that makes you wish you'd left this title on the shelf.
November 30, 2018
What this book’s synopsis and set-up promise should have made for a classic in the Joyce Carol Oates oeuvre and a favorite new release of 2018: a teenage girl living in a near-future dystopian society is ‘banished’ to live in 1950s Wisconsin for daring to question her government in public. If any author could take that premise and not only fulfill it but twist it inside out, JCO could — or so I thought.
What the reader gets, instead, is a too-short novel bordering on young adult territory, all while getting bogged down in philosophical questions and a bogus insta-love relationship at the sake of an enjoyable, riveting plot. What I’ve come to expect from this author — and I am not an expert on her works, by any means — is to be challenged, and rewarded. I was neither of those things. Oates fails to take advantage of the main gimmick, the time travel. A few passing references to the setting in which the main character finds herself are made, but she adapts fairly quickly — perhaps too quickly, considering she has been exhiled eighty years in the past. The main character is far too angsty and reserved and stuck in her own head to be compelling.
I can’t help feeling this novel is Oates on autopilot. This is the literary lioness, so of course the writing is fine from a technical standpoint . . . but oh, it was such a challenge! The unlikable characters, the unrealized setting, the rushed ending. I can’t recommend this. This is a smart book, yes, but almost totally toothless. Yikes.
What the reader gets, instead, is a too-short novel bordering on young adult territory, all while getting bogged down in philosophical questions and a bogus insta-love relationship at the sake of an enjoyable, riveting plot. What I’ve come to expect from this author — and I am not an expert on her works, by any means — is to be challenged, and rewarded. I was neither of those things. Oates fails to take advantage of the main gimmick, the time travel. A few passing references to the setting in which the main character finds herself are made, but she adapts fairly quickly — perhaps too quickly, considering she has been exhiled eighty years in the past. The main character is far too angsty and reserved and stuck in her own head to be compelling.
I can’t help feeling this novel is Oates on autopilot. This is the literary lioness, so of course the writing is fine from a technical standpoint . . . but oh, it was such a challenge! The unlikable characters, the unrealized setting, the rushed ending. I can’t recommend this. This is a smart book, yes, but almost totally toothless. Yikes.
November 25, 2018
Review coming soon.
September 28, 2018
Just about the first thing you see when you open this book is a list of other books by Joyce Carol Oates. There are 41 of them! 41! Plus she also writes under not one but two pseudonyms! Starting in 1964 when I was 3 years old and pouring out of her ever since. How, I ask myself, have I got to be almost 58 years old, reading almost continually since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I have not come across any of them?
My thanks to HarperCollins UK via NetGalley for an ARC of this book which I requested as it seemed an ideal chance to finally find out about such a prolific author. I am not quite so sure I would have requested the book if I had realised that it is very much "young adult" in story and tone. As mentioned above, I am far from being a "young adult" and I have to acknowledge that I rarely read that type of book.
Adriane Stohl lives in a dystopian world where those who dare to engage in free thinking are exiled by being "teletransported" into the past. It is never quite made clear why the state chooses this form of punishment, but I assume it is because it is cheaper than keeping people in prison in your own time. Adriane writes, but never delivers, a speech that asks unpalatable questions and finds herself back in 1959. It would be unfair to say anything further about the plot as that would probably spoil the book for readers, but it (unsurprisingly) involves love. There’s an ending that makes you pause for thought, but it would clearly be wrong of me to discuss that here.
Joyce Carol Oates is also prolific on Twitter. About this book, she tweeted: "If this novel--"Hazards of Time Travel"--had been published before 2016 it would seem like a dystopian future/sci-fi; now, a just slightly distorted mirroring of actual T***p US sliding, we hope not inexorably, into totalitarianism & white apartheid."
Most of the book is Adriane’s experiences in exile, but there are often reflections back to the time and place from which she has been exiled. The book opens with an epigraph taken from "Science and Human Behavior" by B. F. Skinner: A self is simply a device for representing a functionally unified system of responses.. And it is this that the story focuses on. There are multiple references to experiments on both animals and humans investigating the area of free will vs. response to stimuli. Many parallels are drawn between these experiments and the way the totalitarian state watches (and conditions) its people. Adriane seems the kind of feisty young protagonist who inhabits a typical YA novel (at least, what I believe to be typical) as she seeks to assert her “self” against these oppressive rules. Except she isn’t all the time: she goes all weak and feeble in the presence of a man she yearns for. This surprised me and seemed out of character for her. Maybe this is a deliberate thing on the part of the author, but I am not sure I get it.
This is probably a good YA book, but I am not qualified to judge that, as already mentioned. Reading it as an “old adult", it was OK but I couldn’t get excited about it. The story is rather predictable and the message about the totalitarian state a bit heavy-handed. I didn’t come out of it thinking "I must read more by this author", which is a shame as it would have given me plenty more books to read if I had! 2.5 stars rounded down to 2 for the disappointment of discovering it is aimed at people 40-50 years younger than me.
My thanks to HarperCollins UK via NetGalley for an ARC of this book which I requested as it seemed an ideal chance to finally find out about such a prolific author. I am not quite so sure I would have requested the book if I had realised that it is very much "young adult" in story and tone. As mentioned above, I am far from being a "young adult" and I have to acknowledge that I rarely read that type of book.
Adriane Stohl lives in a dystopian world where those who dare to engage in free thinking are exiled by being "teletransported" into the past. It is never quite made clear why the state chooses this form of punishment, but I assume it is because it is cheaper than keeping people in prison in your own time. Adriane writes, but never delivers, a speech that asks unpalatable questions and finds herself back in 1959. It would be unfair to say anything further about the plot as that would probably spoil the book for readers, but it (unsurprisingly) involves love. There’s an ending that makes you pause for thought, but it would clearly be wrong of me to discuss that here.
Joyce Carol Oates is also prolific on Twitter. About this book, she tweeted: "If this novel--"Hazards of Time Travel"--had been published before 2016 it would seem like a dystopian future/sci-fi; now, a just slightly distorted mirroring of actual T***p US sliding, we hope not inexorably, into totalitarianism & white apartheid."
Most of the book is Adriane’s experiences in exile, but there are often reflections back to the time and place from which she has been exiled. The book opens with an epigraph taken from "Science and Human Behavior" by B. F. Skinner: A self is simply a device for representing a functionally unified system of responses.. And it is this that the story focuses on. There are multiple references to experiments on both animals and humans investigating the area of free will vs. response to stimuli. Many parallels are drawn between these experiments and the way the totalitarian state watches (and conditions) its people. Adriane seems the kind of feisty young protagonist who inhabits a typical YA novel (at least, what I believe to be typical) as she seeks to assert her “self” against these oppressive rules. Except she isn’t all the time: she goes all weak and feeble in the presence of a man she yearns for. This surprised me and seemed out of character for her. Maybe this is a deliberate thing on the part of the author, but I am not sure I get it.
This is probably a good YA book, but I am not qualified to judge that, as already mentioned. Reading it as an “old adult", it was OK but I couldn’t get excited about it. The story is rather predictable and the message about the totalitarian state a bit heavy-handed. I didn’t come out of it thinking "I must read more by this author", which is a shame as it would have given me plenty more books to read if I had! 2.5 stars rounded down to 2 for the disappointment of discovering it is aimed at people 40-50 years younger than me.
December 19, 2018
I don't even know where to begin. The premise sounded so interesting and intriguing, so I picked this book up immediately. Even the description here on goodreads sounds like this book might take the direction of The Hunger Games or Divergence. "An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society". I mean if you love dystopian YA literature this sounds right up your alley, doesn't it?
And alas, I was so disappointed in this book. The most interesting part about this whole concept was this new oppressive regime and how it's organized and how it operates and the people living in it, how they are living in it. But sadly this only made up a really small part of the book. And a young woman's resistance? She asked a few questions in her graduation speech that she isn't even presenting, because she is arrested before it can happen and then that's it. The rest of the book she spends in 1959/60 is so boring and nothing happens anymore. Of course in the beginning she struggles, she thinks about the people she left behind, but other than that she just lives in her exile, goes to class, studies and starts obsessing over a man. "She falls in love", more like she gets creepily obsessed with this guy, stalks him, her thoughts are entirely consumed by him and honestly it's just creepy, especially because this guy is literally treating her like garbage. This entire "relationship" is so toxic and unhealthy. Generally the character were really unlikable in my opinion. I wasn't rooting for Adriane, because I was so annoyed by her weird obsession over this guy, who is just not worth it.
I kept reading because I thought that there has to happen something right? I was waiting for the actual plot or the big reveal or something! Anything, but nothing. The things you could have done with this premise! The possibilities! I'm kind of heartbroken for the missed opportunity for another great dystopian YA novel. Where was the rebellion, where was the resistance? And the ending? Are you kidding me? I was so damn disappointed. So boring and pointless. Do yourself a favour and read something else. If you're interested in psychology this book might hold some interest for you, but yeah, that's about it.
And alas, I was so disappointed in this book. The most interesting part about this whole concept was this new oppressive regime and how it's organized and how it operates and the people living in it, how they are living in it. But sadly this only made up a really small part of the book. And a young woman's resistance? She asked a few questions in her graduation speech that she isn't even presenting, because she is arrested before it can happen and then that's it. The rest of the book she spends in 1959/60 is so boring and nothing happens anymore. Of course in the beginning she struggles, she thinks about the people she left behind, but other than that she just lives in her exile, goes to class, studies and starts obsessing over a man. "She falls in love", more like she gets creepily obsessed with this guy, stalks him, her thoughts are entirely consumed by him and honestly it's just creepy, especially because this guy is literally treating her like garbage. This entire "relationship" is so toxic and unhealthy. Generally the character were really unlikable in my opinion. I wasn't rooting for Adriane, because I was so annoyed by her weird obsession over this guy, who is just not worth it.
I kept reading because I thought that there has to happen something right? I was waiting for the actual plot or the big reveal or something! Anything, but nothing. The things you could have done with this premise! The possibilities! I'm kind of heartbroken for the missed opportunity for another great dystopian YA novel. Where was the rebellion, where was the resistance? And the ending? Are you kidding me? I was so damn disappointed. So boring and pointless. Do yourself a favour and read something else. If you're interested in psychology this book might hold some interest for you, but yeah, that's about it.
September 13, 2018
My favorite books about time travel, which include KINDRED by Octavia Butler and VERSION CONTROL by Dexter Palmer, are never just about time travel. Ideally it's a stealthy path into bigger ideas: about history, the role of art, free will, life itself.
HAZARDS is such a book. It gave me a lot to think about, and I suspect this is one I will want to read again, sooner rather than later. It seemed to start off quite openly polemic in its dystopian vision, a 1984 for our times. But it turned into something else, much harder to categorize: a meditation on the nature of reality, among other things. There were points where I thought it had lost its way and other stretches of sheer genius.
The ending was brilliant, I thought.
HAZARDS is such a book. It gave me a lot to think about, and I suspect this is one I will want to read again, sooner rather than later. It seemed to start off quite openly polemic in its dystopian vision, a 1984 for our times. But it turned into something else, much harder to categorize: a meditation on the nature of reality, among other things. There were points where I thought it had lost its way and other stretches of sheer genius.
The ending was brilliant, I thought.
October 19, 2019
Es cierto que tengo debilidad por JCO y que hay novelas suyas absolutamente magistrales, Bellefleur, Hermana mía, mi amor o Blonde y bastantes más que no cito, y otras aunque no magistrales si buenísimas porque siempre tienen un nivel altísimo sobre todo por sus personajes femeninos luchando contra la violencia o sobreviviendo en un mundo muy dificil para ellas.
En esta Riesgos de Viajes en el Tiempo veo que empieza bien presentándonos una especie de futuro distópico donde Adriane, una chica que hace demasiadas preguntas y cuestiona continuamente la sociedad totalitaria en la que le ha tocado vivir, es castiagada y enviada al pasado de 1959: una época dónde no habia móviles, ni internet, donde las chicas se acicalaban el pelo con rulos y se usaban las máquinas de escribir. Y la Oates reflexiona muy bien sobre estos elementos primitivos en comparación a la revolución tecnológica con la llegada de internet y de los ciberespacios.
"Lo curioso del libro es que, al sostenerlo y "leerlo", alcanzas con él una conexión íntima, como con algo vivo, cosa que no se sentía con un libro electrónico; tan pronto como terminabas con el texto electrónico, lo almacenabas o lo borrabas; no tenias un sentimiento especial de propiedad. No lo podías ver en la estanteria ni sobre la mesa, ni tampoco podías admirar su diseño".
Y tambien me gusta el personaje de Adriane del principio, curiosa como ella sola, que se tiene que adaptar a una época que no entiende, completamente sola y sin nadie y a la que le cambian el nombre y pasa a llamarse "Mary Ellen". Ese ajuste mental, que tiene que hacer la protagonista de esta historia (con pérdidas de memoria, sueños y dejá vu's) es quizás lo que más me ha interesado de esta novela interesante por etapas.
"¿Esto pasó hace mucho tiempo o está pasando ahora? ¿O tal vez no ha pasado todavía?"
No me ha parecido una novela redonda porque aunque todo lo que anteriormente he citado es muy disfrutable e interesante (no podía ser menos viniendo de una escritora tan inmensa como JCO), sin embargo creo que la historia flojea hacia la mitad. Parece que se estanca y no evoluciona; no se explican bien algunos giros me da la impresión de que no hay suficiente profundidad a la hora de rematarla. En definitiva, toda la parte de 1960 me parece un tanto irregular, ya que Adriane/Mary Ellen no deviene en el personaje femenino al que siempre me tenía acostumbrada esta autora, es todo demasiado fácil y pasivo en la parte final. Mientra la leía pensaba ponerle cuatro estrellitas pero dándole vueltas a la cabeza y por mucho que adore a esta escritora, no puedo hacerlo ;-(.
En esta Riesgos de Viajes en el Tiempo veo que empieza bien presentándonos una especie de futuro distópico donde Adriane, una chica que hace demasiadas preguntas y cuestiona continuamente la sociedad totalitaria en la que le ha tocado vivir, es castiagada y enviada al pasado de 1959: una época dónde no habia móviles, ni internet, donde las chicas se acicalaban el pelo con rulos y se usaban las máquinas de escribir. Y la Oates reflexiona muy bien sobre estos elementos primitivos en comparación a la revolución tecnológica con la llegada de internet y de los ciberespacios.
"Lo curioso del libro es que, al sostenerlo y "leerlo", alcanzas con él una conexión íntima, como con algo vivo, cosa que no se sentía con un libro electrónico; tan pronto como terminabas con el texto electrónico, lo almacenabas o lo borrabas; no tenias un sentimiento especial de propiedad. No lo podías ver en la estanteria ni sobre la mesa, ni tampoco podías admirar su diseño".
Y tambien me gusta el personaje de Adriane del principio, curiosa como ella sola, que se tiene que adaptar a una época que no entiende, completamente sola y sin nadie y a la que le cambian el nombre y pasa a llamarse "Mary Ellen". Ese ajuste mental, que tiene que hacer la protagonista de esta historia (con pérdidas de memoria, sueños y dejá vu's) es quizás lo que más me ha interesado de esta novela interesante por etapas.
"¿Esto pasó hace mucho tiempo o está pasando ahora? ¿O tal vez no ha pasado todavía?"
No me ha parecido una novela redonda porque aunque todo lo que anteriormente he citado es muy disfrutable e interesante (no podía ser menos viniendo de una escritora tan inmensa como JCO), sin embargo creo que la historia flojea hacia la mitad. Parece que se estanca y no evoluciona; no se explican bien algunos giros me da la impresión de que no hay suficiente profundidad a la hora de rematarla. En definitiva, toda la parte de 1960 me parece un tanto irregular, ya que Adriane/Mary Ellen no deviene en el personaje femenino al que siempre me tenía acostumbrada esta autora, es todo demasiado fácil y pasivo en la parte final. Mientra la leía pensaba ponerle cuatro estrellitas pero dándole vueltas a la cabeza y por mucho que adore a esta escritora, no puedo hacerlo ;-(.
April 19, 2019
This book has left me absolutely speechless.
It has so many elements and many of them contradictory that I simply can't provide a coherent review.
I did enjoy it and it has made me think...but it has also made me confused and frustrated.
You could interpret this book in many different ways...
I'm seeing very mixed reviews for this one and I completely understand that.
I just love Joyce Carol Oates unique style and this book is a challenge...I think I like it!
It has so many elements and many of them contradictory that I simply can't provide a coherent review.
I did enjoy it and it has made me think...but it has also made me confused and frustrated.
You could interpret this book in many different ways...
I'm seeing very mixed reviews for this one and I completely understand that.
I just love Joyce Carol Oates unique style and this book is a challenge...I think I like it!
November 20, 2018
I loved the premise of the book: Adriane Stohl, a curious student living in a totalitarian state where every move and word is monitored by government, is sent back to 1950s middle-America for questioning authority during her Valedictorian speech.
Cool! What happens next? Well, the first part of the book describes the horrors of the totalitarian regime Adriane leaves in. You'd think this part be scary and disturbing but the constant uses of acronyms to define people and organisations makes for a very dry reading.
The second part focuses on Adriane getting to terms with her new life in a past world. This part is a mix of behaviourist psychological principles, attempt to link to the future to the anti-communist activities of the 50s and a lot of boring descriptions about college life at the time.
The real problem is that nothing much happens in the book. You're waiting to see what happens next but 85% through the book you're wondering if this thing even has an ending. Well, it does and it's totally unsatisfactory. I'm not going to spoil it for you. Suffice it to say, I felt totally cheated.
It's a harmless book - but also a pointless one. I wish Oates had developed the story more instead than using it as an excuse to rehash political views.
Cool! What happens next? Well, the first part of the book describes the horrors of the totalitarian regime Adriane leaves in. You'd think this part be scary and disturbing but the constant uses of acronyms to define people and organisations makes for a very dry reading.
The second part focuses on Adriane getting to terms with her new life in a past world. This part is a mix of behaviourist psychological principles, attempt to link to the future to the anti-communist activities of the 50s and a lot of boring descriptions about college life at the time.
The real problem is that nothing much happens in the book. You're waiting to see what happens next but 85% through the book you're wondering if this thing even has an ending. Well, it does and it's totally unsatisfactory. I'm not going to spoil it for you. Suffice it to say, I felt totally cheated.
It's a harmless book - but also a pointless one. I wish Oates had developed the story more instead than using it as an excuse to rehash political views.
April 19, 2020
Update April 19th 2020: Bumped up the rating to 4 stars because I continue to think about this book, and I think I underappreciated it the first time around.*
When an over-achieving high school graduate starts questioning her futuristic authoritarian government, they send her to a college in 1959. She's told that she's being trained for a super secret government job and there are "eyes" watching her at all times. If she tells anyone she's from the future she'll be killed, along with her parents, although her memory has been scrambled and she can't really remember them anyway.
I wasn't quite sure what message the author was trying to get across. She talks about women's rights but only to say women were treated like second-class citizens in the past, and continue to in the future. There are student protests which the main character knows won't make a difference to the future. The professor character teaches his students about experiments where scientists went too far to get the results they wanted. And then there's a love story which we know is doomed from the start.
I enjoyed the read, but definitely feel like I missed something. I haven't read this author before, but plan to give her another try, in hopes that her other works will jive better with me.
When an over-achieving high school graduate starts questioning her futuristic authoritarian government, they send her to a college in 1959. She's told that she's being trained for a super secret government job and there are "eyes" watching her at all times. If she tells anyone she's from the future she'll be killed, along with her parents, although her memory has been scrambled and she can't really remember them anyway.
I wasn't quite sure what message the author was trying to get across. She talks about women's rights but only to say women were treated like second-class citizens in the past, and continue to in the future. There are student protests which the main character knows won't make a difference to the future. The professor character teaches his students about experiments where scientists went too far to get the results they wanted. And then there's a love story which we know is doomed from the start.
I enjoyed the read, but definitely feel like I missed something. I haven't read this author before, but plan to give her another try, in hopes that her other works will jive better with me.
June 20, 2021
Billy Corgan, The Smashing Pumpkins, Bullet with Butterfly Wings: Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage / And someone will say, "What is lost can never be saved."
Beginning in the Oates version of a dystopian future — one that she quickly leaves in order to explore and dissect her characters — we see something not totally unfamiliar.
"America is founded upon amnesia—denial."
Oates began work on this in 2011 and published it in 2018 — in those intervening years, the United States went through quite the upheaval. One we are still experiencing. In this future with the North American States (NAS), somewhere around 2039, conformity is prized and individuality is not. Punishment is apparently severe — Vaporization and Deletion are known forms. So when Adriane Strohl, selected valedictorian of her graduating high school class, relays her speech during a rehearsal for the upcoming ceremony — a speech that is seen as potentially incendiary with a theme of posing questions directly related to their taught history — she is grabbed, questioned, emotionally tortured, and sentenced to serve her punishment. She is charged with "seven counts of Treason-Speech and Questioning of Authority."
When she awakens in a mental fog, she is obliged to assume the identity created for her to exist in her punishment of attending college to re-educate herself — far away from everyone she knows. The setting is idyllic Wainscotia Falls, Wisconsin, and the year is 1959. Adriane now becomes Mary Ellen Enright attending Wainscotia State University, in an area she knows as Zone 9.
"Yet it seemed mysterious to me, that there was, in Zone 9, so much freedom—that, in Zone 9, did not feel like freedom."
From there Oates delves deep and headlong into a psychological analysis, experimenting with her character, Mary Ellen. The entire book is far less Science Fiction and Dystopian than either the opener or the title would suggest. And though Mary Ellen is only 17 at the beginning of the novel, this is not a Young Adult book. Not to say that there's anything untoward in the text — just that the subject matter is full of questions and mental enigmas. It's multilayered and, if you just take the text at face value, these layers might just slide right past you.
It also feels very personal — Oates herself would've been around twenty-one years old in 1959, also attending college in Wisconsin. There's a feeling of resignation, a doleful cloud lingering around the edges, that reminded me of The Bell Jar. But it's as if Oates wanted to luxuriate in the idea of taking herself from now, the present, reanimated in a younger form to see where it would or could lead. What would we really feel in the not-too-distant past? How will the everyday be judged by future generations? So she sends this form back into the past and plays around with knowledge, self-awareness, memory, and psychology.
"Exile means you can't free your mind to think of anything except Exile. While others never question the terms of their existence you question the terms of your existence constantly. Why am I here, when will I be taken from here, who is watching me, who is monitoring me, is it this person who invites me to trust her? What will she report of me? What will be the summary and the judgment?"
One interesting layer to Hazards of Time Travel is that Adriane comes to her new situation to learn, in a sense, but she comes with knowledge of the future. However, her punishment and mode of transportation means that her complete past (1959's future) is not fully accessible to her. It hurts her head when she tries to recall certain things — but there's an undercurrent of knowledge that comes without effort. It's easy to scoff and sneer at what would later be discarded medical advancements when you are coming from the far side of tomorrow. Mary Ellen simply questions everything — which harkens back to her naïve stab at a valedictory speech — and raises ideas that strike at the very core of twentieth century psychology and the history of behaviorism.
A professor of hers, Ira Wolfman, who supposedly studied under B. F. Skinner, becomes a key character. But Mary Ellen is an exemplary student and learns her Psych 101 studies fully — even ideas that predate Skinner's, whose own brand of psychology was that although genes determine who we are, it's environment that shapes personality. And still Mary Ellen cannot help but question and dissect every idea presented to her . . .
". . . human situations were analogous to psychological experiments. . . . The more detailed and "objective" the description of the subject's behavior, the less the experimenter was likely to know what was happening; for one could not infer an inner life, a subjective mode of being, from mere observation. Inevitably, living things were perceived (from the outside) as resembling clockwork mechanism. You wanted to protest—But I am me! I am unique and ungraspable."
. . . Every idea except of her own Exile. Which circles me back around to Oates, exploring the late 1950s with a 2016-ish lens. If forced into this situation, how quickly would one assimilate?
"We are what we are made to be—we must only not resist."
Faced with the constantly looming threat of Deletion, or permanent Exile, how hard would you hold onto your future self, a self that has no place in 1959?
"But now, we can see the clouds approaching, we can see into the distance and so, in a sense, we can see into the future."
Some of Adriane's fumbling and hesitant attempts at adapting to this strange new world of old are humorous. Mary Ellen's attempt to approach a typewriter is especially amusing, as Oates takes the time to include a chapter here, early on to serve as an introduction to 1959, from the viewpoint of her fellow students: "She was a strange girl. At first, we didn't like her." And then we get that same experience of Adriane approaching the typewriter and marveling at the strange simplicity of it while the chattery 1959 girl stood nearby. I was equally amused when Mary Ellen finds herself with a movie club watching a showing of The Searchers (1956): "John Wayne was not an actor I'd ever seen before—conspicuously he seemed to be playing "John Wayne."" (Though I would have loved a thorough discussion in which I could set her right on her loosely formed opinion about Rear Window (1954).)
But mostly the book is about raising questions — not answering them.
"As if to prompt me, he said: 'As a dreamer doesn’t know she is dreaming, so you can't know your circumstances.'"
Offering one explanation while hiding the other behind your back — balling them both into fists and pondering the choices between the two realities available. Exploring the idea that we are all time travelers through our crude stabs at memory recall, and how handling this time of assimilation or trauma would affect your ability to understand yourself and your surroundings.
"For life is now. Life is not thinking, not reflective or backward-glancing; life is forward-plunging; life is the present moment as . . . it is always now."
Audiobook, as narrated by Andi Arndt: Arndt made this strange and beautiful text come alive. She added to the incredibly seductive melancholy that sweeps over the entire narrative with a delightfully complicated voice that sounds layered with versions and appearances of a young, naïve, settled and wise main character.
"I felt like a soft, winged thing, a moth that has been batted out of the air. Not hard enough to break its wings, but hard enough to knock it stunned to earth, and the wings slow-moving, wounded and mute in wonderment."
December 10, 2018
I'm an on-off reader of JCO, in that way we all become when someone of sufficient popularity and prolificacy just won't stop doing their thing. (Q: How can I, someone who doesn't particularly care for Stephen King, have read so many of the guy's books? A: Once someone surpasses a critical threshold of popularity, their books just start appearing in your hands. Like when Homer's punching the cat without realising it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gs73... )
Anyway she won a fan in me when I tried out A Book of American Martyrs, which is a searing firecracker of a novel. Gripping, lively, touches upon contemporary political taboos without preaching... It was great! And I'll for sure peruse her back catalogue of stuff again at some point (Ugh, when. Maybe never. But the intention is there :D)
I saw this one and couldn't resist and was excited even more so to have barely heard of it before picking it up. A hype-free new novel from an author I like! That's the dream!
But, Woody Allen-style, if a new thing is to come out every year, you likely get one good one, one mediocre one. (And then if you're unlucky, ever experiencing the artist's work becomes unconscionable and you can never look at it the same way again. "Why did no one notice that massively famous comedian was talking about his dick THE WHOLE TIME? And how did we ever find it funny? Oh well. Let's welcome him back to the stage and let him talk about his dick again. The sooner we put this behind us, the better, and with any luck this won't provide a new context that mars his entire oeuvre.")
Oh yeah so the actual book.
It was at first heavy-handed, which I didn't mind—it was in that enjoyable way it always is in the zip-zoomy era of sci-fi. Later, the narrative skilfully avoids cliches of dystopian fiction. And luckily there was no looming OrangeManGood etc.
As we travel back in time to late 50s Wisconsin, JCO explores questions of free will in a suitably fresh way, and her aims become clearer. For example, in her future, people are separated by skin tone. Well, they did that in the past as well, though they did it in a different manner and called it something else. In the 50s, women wear hair rollers to sleep, despite how uncomfortable they are and the difficult process of setting them up, out of peer pressure. Not quite the same as something government-mandated, but both imply giving away a piece of free will. Sometimes we do this by force, other times voluntarily.
But no worries, she only ever glances off these ideas, leaves them there for the reader to find. This instils in us a great feeling of trust, that we'll bring our own intelligence to the book enough to work out its meaning without needing them handed to us.
This contrast of fictional past and future conspicuously leaves out the present, which is what this novel is of course really about. How is our present reality different from this fictional past and future? Or rather, how is the US' reality different—y'all've made the Tracy Emin's bed of political moves and now you gotta lie in it.
The plot raises further interesting questions in ways I won't spoil—but it reminded me of something I've been thinking about recently. (Or been made to think about by horrible people at parties trying to take me down... Anyway.)
My husband is for sure my soulmate. Alain de Botton in "Essays in Love" uses a curious bit of statistics to prove that such a thing couldn't be the case. If "soulmate" is taken to mean "the one person on the planet for you", the chances of you meeting that person are so slim as to be completely negligible. Maybe that was true when we first met, but having spent like 8 years of life, having built something together, experienced so much as a couple, maybe we have made ourselves the people for each other. The initial "soulmate feeling" of meeting demonstrated the potential for this, which we have crafted together into a unique reality.
But that's the amazing and disturbing thing about human beings: we are able to craft meaning of the highest level wherever and whenever we are. Committing to loving someone means refusing to imagine your life without them—when countless other potential partner combinations are, in some respect, always available to you. We can develop an affection for being alive in our time that others had of theirs, even though we had no choice in the matter of when we should live. That both means we have the capacity to generate enough meaning to sustain ourselves in every kind of scenario, but also that any kind of meaning we construct may just be that, constructed and ultimately arbitrary. It's something amazing about human beings that we will make ourselves fit, and make that feel like destiny. But are we merely rats in a maze who don't want to leave the familiarity of our cage, even when the door is taken off? As JCO puts it in the book, it's only in logical puzzles that x cannot be x and non-x at the same time, whereas in life that's almost always the case.
Some terrors in the past, like nuclear panic, turned out not to be a big deal. Some science gets debunked. What do we, in the present, take that to mean? Likely that some of our predictions are wrong, which might be some relief—but if we knew which predictions were the wrong ones, we'd get to stop making them. Whatever information that's currently available is after all the best we have to go on, and therefore we must operate as if that's the case. This idea is a relief and it's not.
Speaking of not knowing what may or may not be a good use of our time, JCO can't get off Twitter, which will have unquestionably screwed with her sense of what is going on in her own country, nay the world.
Pray for JCO and keep your fingers crossed her next book's a stormer :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gs73... )
Anyway she won a fan in me when I tried out A Book of American Martyrs, which is a searing firecracker of a novel. Gripping, lively, touches upon contemporary political taboos without preaching... It was great! And I'll for sure peruse her back catalogue of stuff again at some point (Ugh, when. Maybe never. But the intention is there :D)
I saw this one and couldn't resist and was excited even more so to have barely heard of it before picking it up. A hype-free new novel from an author I like! That's the dream!
But, Woody Allen-style, if a new thing is to come out every year, you likely get one good one, one mediocre one. (And then if you're unlucky, ever experiencing the artist's work becomes unconscionable and you can never look at it the same way again. "Why did no one notice that massively famous comedian was talking about his dick THE WHOLE TIME? And how did we ever find it funny? Oh well. Let's welcome him back to the stage and let him talk about his dick again. The sooner we put this behind us, the better, and with any luck this won't provide a new context that mars his entire oeuvre.")
Oh yeah so the actual book.
It was at first heavy-handed, which I didn't mind—it was in that enjoyable way it always is in the zip-zoomy era of sci-fi. Later, the narrative skilfully avoids cliches of dystopian fiction. And luckily there was no looming OrangeManGood etc.
As we travel back in time to late 50s Wisconsin, JCO explores questions of free will in a suitably fresh way, and her aims become clearer. For example, in her future, people are separated by skin tone. Well, they did that in the past as well, though they did it in a different manner and called it something else. In the 50s, women wear hair rollers to sleep, despite how uncomfortable they are and the difficult process of setting them up, out of peer pressure. Not quite the same as something government-mandated, but both imply giving away a piece of free will. Sometimes we do this by force, other times voluntarily.
But no worries, she only ever glances off these ideas, leaves them there for the reader to find. This instils in us a great feeling of trust, that we'll bring our own intelligence to the book enough to work out its meaning without needing them handed to us.
This contrast of fictional past and future conspicuously leaves out the present, which is what this novel is of course really about. How is our present reality different from this fictional past and future? Or rather, how is the US' reality different—y'all've made the Tracy Emin's bed of political moves and now you gotta lie in it.
The plot raises further interesting questions in ways I won't spoil—but it reminded me of something I've been thinking about recently. (Or been made to think about by horrible people at parties trying to take me down... Anyway.)
My husband is for sure my soulmate. Alain de Botton in "Essays in Love" uses a curious bit of statistics to prove that such a thing couldn't be the case. If "soulmate" is taken to mean "the one person on the planet for you", the chances of you meeting that person are so slim as to be completely negligible. Maybe that was true when we first met, but having spent like 8 years of life, having built something together, experienced so much as a couple, maybe we have made ourselves the people for each other. The initial "soulmate feeling" of meeting demonstrated the potential for this, which we have crafted together into a unique reality.
But that's the amazing and disturbing thing about human beings: we are able to craft meaning of the highest level wherever and whenever we are. Committing to loving someone means refusing to imagine your life without them—when countless other potential partner combinations are, in some respect, always available to you. We can develop an affection for being alive in our time that others had of theirs, even though we had no choice in the matter of when we should live. That both means we have the capacity to generate enough meaning to sustain ourselves in every kind of scenario, but also that any kind of meaning we construct may just be that, constructed and ultimately arbitrary. It's something amazing about human beings that we will make ourselves fit, and make that feel like destiny. But are we merely rats in a maze who don't want to leave the familiarity of our cage, even when the door is taken off? As JCO puts it in the book, it's only in logical puzzles that x cannot be x and non-x at the same time, whereas in life that's almost always the case.
Some terrors in the past, like nuclear panic, turned out not to be a big deal. Some science gets debunked. What do we, in the present, take that to mean? Likely that some of our predictions are wrong, which might be some relief—but if we knew which predictions were the wrong ones, we'd get to stop making them. Whatever information that's currently available is after all the best we have to go on, and therefore we must operate as if that's the case. This idea is a relief and it's not.
Speaking of not knowing what may or may not be a good use of our time, JCO can't get off Twitter, which will have unquestionably screwed with her sense of what is going on in her own country, nay the world.
Pray for JCO and keep your fingers crossed her next book's a stormer :)
December 17, 2018
Joyce Carol Oates is one of those authors whose name I have seen on countless occasions, yet none of her books ever grabbed my attention. I knew the name, but none of her work screamed ‘read me’. Until Hazards of Time Travel, that is.
Hazards of Time Travel sounded like the kind of book I would adore. A dystopian tale mixed with time travel – of course, I would be all over that. Add in the fact it would finally cure my curiosity about Joyce Carol Oates, and I was more than happy to borrow this from the library the moment it appeared.
At first, this one sucked me in. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I was curious. It was one of those books that wrapped around me with the promise of things improving. Thus, I kept reading. There was a point where I believed it was getting better, where I was falling in love with the story, but this did not last for long. By the end of this book, my feelings towards this book were all rather negative – all surrounding disappointment.
I admit, a part of me did consider giving this a two-star rating. There was a time, a decent chunk of time, where this book was going to receive a two-star rating from me. The fact it held my attention and left me willing to continue, the way it left me wanting more, had me believing I should round my rating up. However, I was so disappointed in the end, I could not quite bring myself to do so.
I went into this one expecting a wonderful science fiction novel, one that mixed two of my favourite things together. As it was, the both the time travel and the dystopian aspects failed to wow me. In fact, I feel as though both elements barely touched the surface as what could have been.
Instead of being a powerful dystopian tale or a powerful time travel story, this became a story of following a female lead through emotions I could never connect to. It would have been fine, I guess, had I been able to connect to the female lead, but I spent the entire book unable to like her. Thus, I was unable to care about what was happening to her.
I know many people are Joyce Carol Oates fans, but Hazards of Time Travel failed to show me why.
Hazards of Time Travel sounded like the kind of book I would adore. A dystopian tale mixed with time travel – of course, I would be all over that. Add in the fact it would finally cure my curiosity about Joyce Carol Oates, and I was more than happy to borrow this from the library the moment it appeared.
At first, this one sucked me in. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I was curious. It was one of those books that wrapped around me with the promise of things improving. Thus, I kept reading. There was a point where I believed it was getting better, where I was falling in love with the story, but this did not last for long. By the end of this book, my feelings towards this book were all rather negative – all surrounding disappointment.
I admit, a part of me did consider giving this a two-star rating. There was a time, a decent chunk of time, where this book was going to receive a two-star rating from me. The fact it held my attention and left me willing to continue, the way it left me wanting more, had me believing I should round my rating up. However, I was so disappointed in the end, I could not quite bring myself to do so.
I went into this one expecting a wonderful science fiction novel, one that mixed two of my favourite things together. As it was, the both the time travel and the dystopian aspects failed to wow me. In fact, I feel as though both elements barely touched the surface as what could have been.
Instead of being a powerful dystopian tale or a powerful time travel story, this became a story of following a female lead through emotions I could never connect to. It would have been fine, I guess, had I been able to connect to the female lead, but I spent the entire book unable to like her. Thus, I was unable to care about what was happening to her.
I know many people are Joyce Carol Oates fans, but Hazards of Time Travel failed to show me why.
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