★★★☆☆ A LOT of novel

Myriad

Joshua David Bellin

Once when I was a postdoc at MIT, I heard physicist Alan Guth speak in the Physics Colloquium. Guth was known for having invented the idea of Cosmic Inflation, that the universe exploded in size just BEFORE the Big Bang, setting the initial conditions for the Big Bang. (Versions of this idea are now mainstream physics.) In his Colloquium, he discussed the possibility that inflation could start anytime, anywhere, from quantum fluctuations. This, he showed us, would lead to the creation of a new universe. He then asked how we might see this. And he showed us that since the new universe would be entirely unattached to the one in which it began, there would be no observable consequence in the universe in which it originated.

I was bemused. It felt to me as if he had walked down to the front of the room, pulled his hand out of his pocket and there unfolded an entire new universe. He then folded the new universe back up in his hand and put it back in his pocket, leaving nothing to show for it. That is how I felt on finishing Myriad. Myriad is of course a time travel novel. This recalls to me something from Jasper Fforde's First Among Sequels.

‘I was thinking of doing a self-help book for SF novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: don’t.’
--First Among Sequels, Jasper Fforde

(First Among Sequels is the fifth book in a series that heavily features time travel, so it is obvious that Fforde doesn't take his own advice too seriously.)

I am not going to summarize the plot of Myriad. It is one of those giant time travel hairballs in which children travel back in time and kill their parents, and parents kill their children, and people meet different versions of themselves. And somehow in the end it all wraps up rather neatly. I don't fully understand everything that happened. A lot is explained by the time you reach the end of the book, but much is left unexplained. This, honestly, didn't bother me. A lot of modern Science Fiction has these giant tangle plots in which it is almost impossible for the reader to understand what just happened. Fine -- I'm used to it. In fact, these days, I'm almost disappointed if I understand a Science Fiction novel the first time I read it.

What bothered me more was that many of the people in Myriad are horrible and do horrible things to each other. It was difficult to like any of them. (To be sure, that was partly because many of the main characters came in multiple versions, and even if one version was a nice person, there was usually also another version who was awful.)

The literary genre "Horrible people being horrible to each other" is not one of my favorites. Myriad, alas, is a sterling example. Couple that with the sheer effort required to read and understand it, and you end up with a book that is difficult to enjoy. (Or, at least, it was so for me.) Still, it deserves points for creativity.

I thank NetGalley and Angry Robot for an advance reader copy of Myriad, by Joshua David Bellin. This review expresses my honest opinions.

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