sci-fi – What Cathy Read Next…

About the Book

Book cover of The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time travel.

Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more.

But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?

Format: Hardback (368 pages) Publisher: Sceptre
Publication date: 16th May 2024 Genre: Science Fiction

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My Review

I first heard about this book at the Women’s Prize Live event in June last year. Listening to the author talk about it, I thought then that the premise sounded really intriguing so, prompted by enthusiastic early reviews by other book bloggers, I was thrilled when my request for it was approved on NetGalley.

I’ll confess that, for a while, I wasn’t quite sure if the book was going to work for me. I recall commenting to another book blogger that the author didn’t seem to have made up her mind whether she was writing science fiction or romance. I shouldn’t have worried because the book is an inventive and totally absorbing blend of both with a dash of historical fiction and an element of mystery added for good measure. If this all sounds a bit of mishmash, think of it instead as a glorious cocktail of different ingredients that once you’ve downed it you immediately want to drink again… except this time surely it tastes slightly different?

I’m not going to try to summarise the plot for fear of spoilers but what I can say is you will meet some wonderful characters. Commander Graham Gore, obviously, but also Arthur (‘1916’) and Margaret Kemble (‘1665’). There’s a lot of humour as the ‘expats’ are introduced to modern technology, attitudes and concepts by their ‘bridges’. Margaret’s 17th century mode of speech and inventive cursing is both endearing and very funny.

But there’s also a serious side as well as the expats learn about world events that have taken place since they were ‘extracted’ from their own time. For example, Arthur, having been plucked from the Battle of the Somme, is horrified to discover that there was a second world war, although in other ways the modern world may be more accommodating than the one he left. Having all been rescued from certain death, survivor’s guilt is real for them. This is especially the case for Gore once he learns the fate of his comrades on Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition. He is haunted by the knowledge his markmanship might have made a difference to their survival. I particularly liked the sections which take us back in time to witness the ill-fated mission from the point of view of Gore.

There’s a sinister aspect to the way the expats are constantly monitored (in more ways than they realise), periodically assessed and tested by Ministry officials, and reported on by their ‘bridges’ who also exercise control over the information they are given. Just why these particular individuals were chosen to be ‘rescued’ becomes a source of mystery too.

There’s an interesting parallel made between the assimilation of the expats into the modern world (to misquote E. M. Forster, ‘The present is a foreign country: they do things differently there‘) and the experience of people moving from one culture or country to another. Gore’s bridge is part-Cambodian and the daughter of immigrants so she has had to be a ‘bridge’ for her Cambodian mother, helping her learn a new language and so on.

A wonderfully supportive relationship develops between the three expats and the narrator also becomes more a friend than a ‘bridge’, although this brings its own challenges for her. One particular relationship becomes the main focus of the story and if it doesn’t touch your heart I’ll be surprised.

Towards the end of the book, the author really ups the action and throws in a terrific curved ball that took my brain a while to unscramble. The message I had no difficulty understanding, though, was that whereas you can’t change the past, you can change the future. Oh, and the enduring power of love.

I thought The Ministry of Time was mindbendingly brilliant and definitely among the most enjoyable books I’ve read so far this year.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Hodder & Stoughton via NetGalley.

In three words: Imaginative, clever, enthralling
Try something similar: The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas

About the Author

Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short stories have appeared in Electric Literature, Catapult, Somesuch Stories and The Willowherb Review, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. The Ministry of Time is her first novel. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

About the Book

‘Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.’

America, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The winning Axis powers have divided their spoils: the Nazis control New York, while California is ruled by the Japanese.

But between these two states – locked in a cold war – lies a neutral buffer zone in which legendary author Hawthorne Abendsen is rumoured to live. Abendsen lives in fear of his life for he has written a book in which World War Two was won by the Allies . . .

Format: ebook (274 pages) Publisher: Penguin
Publication date: 2nd August 2012 [1962] Genre: Science Fiction

Find The Man in the High Castle on Goodreads

My Review

I was delighted when 1962 was chosen by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book as the year for this twice-yearly reading club because I’ve had The Man in the High Castle on my Kindle since October 2017 and this has given me the push I needed to read it.

In his excellent introduction to this Penguin Moderns Classics edition, Eric Brown describes Philip K. Dick as having been ‘obsessed with the idea that the universe was only apparently real, an illusion behind which the truth might dwell’. The author presents an alternate history – that the United States lost the Second World War – and has been divided into three states: the eastern seaboard ruled by Nazi Germany, the western seaboard by the Japanese and the third, the autonomous Rocky Mountain State which is in effect a demilitarized zone between the other two. Many high-ranking Nazis live on, including Heydrich, Goebbels and Bormann, although Hitler has gone mad and is confined to an asylum. As one character observes, ‘A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power’.

The book explores the consequences of the war’s outcome through the lives of a number of different characters including Juliana who works as a Judo instructor in the Rocky Mountain State, Juliana’s estranged husband Frank Frink, Robert Childan a trader in pre-war American artefacts and Nobusuke Tagomi, head of the Japanese trade mission in San Francisco.

Into this Dick inserts an ‘alternate’ alternate history, as many of the characters are reading a book entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the premise of which is that Germany and Japan were defeated. Its author is the ‘Man in the High Castle’ of the title but is he a visionary or a kind of amanuensis? In fact, at one point a character experiences a brief glimpse of the US of that ‘alternate’ alternate history, suggesting perhaps the existence of a parallel universe.

Another theme of the book is what constitutes the real as opposed to the fake, something that was central to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but here is more concerned with objects than with humans. For example, Robert Childan sells historical artefacts to Japanese collectors some of which may in fact be reproductions. And when Frank Frink, disillusioned with producing such reproductions, starts a business creating original, handmade jewellery he is advised to have the pieces mass-produced and promoted as good luck charms.

Identity and status is another theme, especially in the area of the United States now under occupation by Japan. In one scene, Mr Tagomi attends a meeting taking with him an empty briefcase because he feels to go without it would give the appearance of being ‘a mere spectator’. In another Robert Childan worries how it will appear to others if he carries his own packages rather than using a slave. Cleverly, the author has Robert’s speech and internal dialogue mimic the rhythms of the Japanese occupiers to whom he is considered inferior.

I found the book fascinating and became immersed in the lives of the characters. My favourite was Mr Tagomi because of the extent to which we witness his moral conflicts. I’m afraid I did struggle with the frequent references to the Chinese divination text, the I Ching, on which many of the characters rely to determine what course they should take.

The Man in the High Castle is a chilling dystopia in which whole continents have been destroyed, their populations killed or consigned to servitude, in which slavery is once again legal and the few Jewish people who survived the Holocaust must hide their identities or face death. It’s a nightmare vision but one that sometimes feels uncomfortably close to present day events.

In three words: Thought-provoking, insightful, imaginative

Try something similar: Fatherland by Robert Harris

About the Author

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928, but lived most of his life in California, briefly attending the University of California at Berkeley in 1947. Among the most prolific and eccentric of SF writers, Dick’s many novels and stories all blend a sharp and quirky imagination with a strong sense of the surreal.

By the time of his death in 1982 he had written over thirty science-fiction novels and 112 short stories. Notable titles amongst the novels include The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968, later used as the basis for the film Blade Runner), Ubik (1969) and A Scanner Darkly (1977). The Man in the High Castle (1962), perhaps his most painstakingly constructed and chilling novel, won a Hugo Award in 1963.