There are two aspects to time travel, travelling to another time; making a change before returning to the starting point. That change leads to other changes and those to other changes still. HG Wells noted this in The Time Machine, Hollywood in its Back to The Future series.
11.22.63 by Stephen King 740pp, 2011 Hodder & Stoughton. Hardcover. Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops, 995 baht
The genre is in the realm of science fiction, yet a good many authors don't give it that Ray Bradbury feel. To explain the time machine they use a hypnotic dream or a magic door. Readers and viewers are expected to draw on their reserve of suspended disbelief. Novels and films are based on imagination, after all.
Stephen King's 11.22.63 is such a story. The title date is seared in our memory like Dec 7, 1941 and Sept 11, 2001. For it was on Nov 22, 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated the US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy. (Whether or not there were other shooters as well is a moot question.)
The protagonist is Jake Epping, an English teacher in Maine at the present time. He is given the opportunity to prevent tragedies by going back in time to 1958 _ passing through a friend's magic curtain. He finds himself in place in 1958. Theatres and television, no iPods or computers. Fear that the Cold War will turn hot and Russia is winning the space race.
The author spends hundreds of pages on the era. The price of oil hasn't taken off and finned gas-guzzlers fill the roads. Low prices, low wages. Cigarette advertisements everywhere. Everybody dances to the music of the big band. Knowing what will happen, Jake kills a man about to murder the family of one of his present-day students.
Using the name George Lambertson to throw the police off his trail, Jake meets and falls in love with school librarian Sadie Dunhill. Telling her all, she half-believes him, but goes along. It's the 1960s by now. He bets on the underdog in a prizefight he knows will win. The bookie pays him off, then beats him up for being in on the "fix".
Jake reaches Oswald at the Book Depository Building in Dallas in the time to spoil his aim, with Sadie shot dead instead. Cops gun down the would-be assassin. JFK survives and King goes into his version of the decades to come. Guesswork and, to this reviewer, most unlikely. Jake comes back to the present, then returns to the past to meet Sadie again. 11.22.63 raises more questions than it answers.
Two of the Deadliest by Elizabeth George 485 pp, 2009 Hodder paperback. Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops, 350 baht
Women on women
Women are by no means the second sex when it comes to writing. Lady Murasaki, Madame de Stael, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Patricia Cornwell, Pearl Buck are at least as good as their male counterparts. They've penned stories in every genre, from war and peace, love and sesx, to murder.
Agatha Christie is synonymous with crime, the first of many of her gender who have made names for themselves in that field. Contrary to the feminist mantra that women by definition are victims, which statistics bear out.
Elizabeth George, a noted crime fiction author, has edited a work of short stories titled Two of the Deadliest. It contains two dozen short stories by women writers about two of the seven deadly sins; lust and greed. Perusing the lot, more than a few male readers will come to the realisation of how little women think of women.
There's more to women than love songs and poetry, big breasts and shapely legs. They aren't natural homemakers or nurturing mums, straitjacketed by society. Intelligent enough to know that men are physically stronger, they have to use their wits to outsmart them and are not above killing them.
The stories in this anthology are pretty evenly matched, making it difficult to comparatively rate them. A factor in a number of the stories is that the woman is older than the man, and every bit as eager to pillow _ a cougar. One mother seduces her son's friend. Women aged 40-plus come across as more desirable than those 20-plus.
One story this reviewer liked for a perverse reason. An English teacher assigns her class to write about what they did on their summer vacation, a teenage lad writes his full of expletives. Interestingly, he didn't get the girl. In another I liked, a Boston serial rapist is the narrator's lover.
A dry cleaner's employee puts on a customers' gown, only to find that the big date she's with in a luxury car is a valet. A cop and a witness are Sherlock Holmes fans and keep referring to the sleuth's cases. A lot have mother- or grandmother-daughter conflicts.
Characters range from well educated to street smart, born with silver spoons in their mouth or made it by their merits, they are tough and often better in a crisis than men. Bring it out at your peril.
